It’s time again for some Opera stuff. There is some good news for Opera fans. According to Market Share opera’s market share has increased from 0.52% in the beginning of the year to 0.87% in December. It’s currently in 4rth position; well behind Internet Explorer (79.64%), Mozilla Firefox (14% – which is an increase of 4.5% from Jan ’06) and Safari (4.24%). Netscape is now just behind Opera with 0.85% (it had 1.17% market share in Jan ’06). So, Opera v9 is indeed making some headway.
Opera 9 has already impressed a lot of Techies. eWeek chose Opera as one of the Top Products of 2006. Digit – leading tech magazine in India now includes Opera in its list of essential software.
However, Opera’s market share is still small enough for major websites to completely ignore the browser. The latest offender is Askx – the new Web 2.0 avatar of the search engine Ask.com. And again the problem is due to lousy web developers. You can find more info on this here.
This is what David Storey from Opera Software had to say :
I ‘ve been talking to the guys at Ask about this. They are looking to support Opera in the near future. As always, if they are aware that Opera users are trying to use the site then any fixes will get greater priority. Thanks to anyone that has wrote to them already.
I would request all Opera users to contact guys from AskX using the contact form. Of course when it comes to blocking Opera users Google is currently the biggest culprit. João Eiras wrote an userjs to allow opera users to use google services without masking as mozilla/ie. The userjs has workarounds for Google Spreadsheets, Docs, Calender and Picassa Web. Download link and more info is available here (Source : Operawatch).
Off course the real big Opera event that happened last month was the launch of beta version of Opera for Wii. It received wide coverage from mainstream media around the world, and hopefully will get more people to use the desktop version of opera. Interestingly enough according to guys from WiiNintendo.com, it’s codenamed “Mozilla”.
I know that a lot of Opera users want something like StumbleUpon for Opera. Although there are some alternatives which tries to achieve this using panels and buttons none are really very good. Opera community member Magnus Nygaard has created an widget called iLike that’s similar to Stumble Upon in principle. However, at the moment its just too simple to work. I found a lot of non-english and spam sites. I hope that he continues to work on this widget, as it would be lovely if properly done.
Before I end, a very important piece of info for those of you using old versions of Opera. Two Highly critical Vulnerabilities affecting Opera v9.02 (and older versions) have been reported by secunia. So immediately download and install Opera v9.10. You can read the advisory here.
That’s all for now.
Update (8th Jan) : Opera today announced a new strategic partnership for which Opera has named Yahoo! as the exclusive provider of mobile search on its millions of Web browsers for mobile phones, Opera Mini™ and Opera Mobile™, across more than 100 countries worldwide. Opera will launch the new Yahoo! oneSearch™ when it goes live globally later in Q1 2007.
The press release is available here.
Opera is certainly good. But I love Firefox!
Haha. Firefox fans rejoice, Opera is just a measly .85%. Shame….
Goobi, you off all people (being a mac user) should know that market share doesnt always represent quality and class.
Numbers may not represent quality or class as you say but its numbers that first hit a user’s brain when he decides to switch 😉
I used Opera before Firefox, jumped to the latter because I found/find Opera too confusing with the amount of options it gives. It is intelligent, yes. But it must try to be more simpler 🙁