[Dysiode]

While Opera is arguably ahead of the curve in many areas I've always felt they lack the polish everyone else brings. Be it Safari's glossy SpeedDial or Chromes fancy tear-away tabs Opera has a great idea and then consistently falls short of the mark.

Worse the areas they didn't pioneer they still fall short. For example I go really excited about some of the parts of their extension API... until I read Chrome's API which is significantly more fleshed out.

I still can't tear myself away from Opera though. I just can't get used to the extension-based replacements for much of the native functionality, be it mouse gestures, the RSS reader, notes (oh gosh. notes.). It would be nice if, as David points out in his article, they focused more on polish than on new features. At the moment Opera feels a lot like "old" Google with a whole bunch of creative, yet half-baked, ideas.

[gnosis]

"While Opera is arguably ahead of the curve in many areas I've always felt they lack the polish everyone else brings. Be it Safari's glossy SpeedDial or Chromes fancy tear-away tabs Opera has a great idea and then consistently falls short of the mark."

Do most users actually comparison shop browsers? Do they try out Opera, Chrome, and Safari and then decide they'd prefer one over the other because of some eye candy the others lack?

I'm sure some power users do, but I would bet that the average user just uses whatever's already installed at work, or whatever browser sounds like what they've heard other people talk about.

They don't have the time or interest to comparison shop (and probably wouldn't even know what to look for, or even that other browsers exist).

[justincormack]

Someone in the office or wherever will switch people slowly. People do rely on the office geek to tell them whats best as they dont know, and that person probably does the preinstall or technical induction for new users...