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Opera is still being a cry baby over MS's decision to remove IE8 from the European versions of W7.
Unfortunalty they havent realised that the vast majority could give a rats ar$e about there browser and will choose Firefox, Chrome or Safari instead of them if they dont want IE on there system. This they feel is unfair and need MS to be continually punished until Opera is number one.



So FF having a healthy market share, Safari and Chrome all rising in usage and IE usage dropping, is a sign of an unhealthy competition.
Opera need to grow up and get a product that people know about and want to use.

(in fairness I will declare I use IE 6,7,8, Safari, Chrome and Firefox depending on my whim at the time (and which machine Im using) but feel no need to use Opera. In fact I feel the need to strongly boycot them )

I'm not sure why. Their browser has consistently been one that adheres to the W3C standards above all else, so can be held up as a beacon to show the others where to go.

I have a copy for testing against. I admit it annoys the pants off me, but there you go.

Being standards compliant is not the issue. Its Opera's apparant viewpoint that "nobody is using us because the evil empire is stopping anyone from being successful" even though FF are showing you can fight against the Sith lords.
Competition in the browser category is as fierce as it ever was, if not fiercer with FF,Safari & chrome in the mix as major players battle against IE.

I'm definitely inclined to agree with Bobbdobbs on this one, they do seem to be acting in a rather pathetic fashion.

Also, as far as my development experience goes, FF, Safari and Opera are all pretty much the same on standards compliance. Opera certainly doesn't seem to have any advantage in that department.

i have never been able to get on with Opera
it just doesn't seem to feel right …

Not now that the others have caught up.

I agree, they are behaving like the spoiled kid who is being ignored. Hang on, isn't Opera still popular on mobile devices?

The problem with Opera is that for a long time, it was not free - you had to BUY a copy. Why, reasoned the market, should you buy something when there are free alternatives? They hurt themselves big time by doing that, and have not recovered.

They’ve always been whining on in the background, and every now and then some Opera fan will pipe up that a website does not work well on their browser. You had to do a a bit of Total Perspective Vortex realignment on them and tell them that when their browser, which is in the 1% labelled “other” on browser usage stats starts to make more of an impression, it will be worth investigating (this at a time when the 95% figure was occupied by good old IE).

Chrome and Safari are HTML5 compliant and Firefox 3.5 is a long way to being compliant.

That leaves Opera trailing Firefox on compliance, but ahead of IE...

I think it is just sour grapes from Opera. They are a one trick pony and they are seeing their market disappear under free products. They stuck to selling their browser or using built in adverts for too long for people to take them seriously. Their mobile browsers aren't bad, but you (or the device manufacturers) have to pay for the browser on those platforms.

Given the state of competition in the market, they should shut up and come up with a product which can compete with Firefox, Safari and co...

I never understood paying for a browser, and I bet the majority of others don’t either.

I think the most expensive one I saw was one on the RISC OS platform for £99!

Firefox FTMFW!

Though Safari (when used with OS X, NOT Windows) is nice.

Firefox at home, IE at work, Chrome when I fancy it and Opera on my iPod Touch. If MS removed IE from any operating system they've ever made I still wouldnt use Opera on my desktop.

Before the great reformat of 2009 (new lappy HDD), I had FF and opera. Opera would always load quicker than FF, so if I needed to check something quickly, I'd use opera. Since the reformat, FF has been faster at loading (though still slower than opera used to load) so haven't bothered with opera again.

I should give Safari a go at some point, now that I have it due to it being pre-loaded onto my MBP. However, I like firefox - mainly for it's impressive selection of add-ons such as adblock and xmarks, allowing me to synchronise my bookmarks across all 3 operating systems. It is that that puts it above every other browser, nothing to do with standards and nothing to do with what was pre-installed. I also like Flock for it's social networking features - but that is basically Firefox anyway.

I’m sure you’ll love this story then:

http://my.opera.com/hallvors/blog/2009/ ... cript-ever