[markdown]

Serious question (no seriously!)...

Given that you will always have to deal with service providers not supporting your browser, why do you choose to continue using it?

Usually there is an idealogical reason for this sort of stance, but Opera isn't FOSS, and that's the only reason I can think of that someone would choose to put up with an inferior software experience.

Why not switch to Chrome or Firefox?

[bajsejohannes]

I was a long time Opera user. I loved that browser. Everything is at your fingertips. You may spend half your day in your browser, so having everything one click away is great. And if it's not one click away, you can make it so. And if you don't like they way HN looks and behaves, you can change all of that easily (once you know how to). Heck, I even worked at Opera for five years because I loved it so much.

In the end, though, compatibilty issues led me to another browser. I miss much of the functionality, but browser support trumps that.

Opera is to browsers what vim is to text editors. Great if you know how to use it properly, but horrible in some very real and recurring situations.

[rartichoke]

How can you possibly compare Opera to vim heh?

I put a 70 year old dude on Opera to help prevent him from getting random malware. It took less than a minute to explain to a completely computer illiterate person that he has to click the red icon instead of the blue icon to "launch the internet".

Once it's open it's not very different from other browsers other than it having extremely useful features that most browsers end up adapting months or years later!

[markdown]

Thanks for the great answer :)

[dgesang]

I use Chromium, FF and Opera, but each for a specific purpose.

Opera: General browsing/research with dozens of tabs. It's so stable you can have it run for several days and don't need to worry about performance, everything runs smoothly, always. When it comes to stability, Opera is the Debian of browsers. ;) Also it has the easiest/best implementation of incognito mode. There are many other reason, but it's best to try it out for yourself. Not just one day or two, but several months.

FF: For development, debugging, testing and some other stuff. I prefer to use it for some darker corners of the web and websites I don't trust, as No-Script is the most advanced script blocker available.

Chromium (in specific Comodo Dragon): Almost the same as FF, but in addition I have to use it to keep track of all the cutting-edge HTML5 stuff. Sad story behind this is that many web-developers don't care about standards and only test there sites with FF/Chromium.

I like them all, I'm not an ideologist, every tool has its purpose. But Opera suits my needs the most.

What I don't like are ignorant web developers!

[yareally]

>...but Opera isn't FOSS

Chrome isn't either, unless one is referring to Chromium and the differences between the two are more than just name[1]. Many power users like native support of some features opera has that other browser need extensions (with limitations) to have something similar. Pushing a particular browser on others is also just silly when we're all using modern browsers that make it easy to support compared to the crap we went through to work around ie6 and ie7 in the past.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsGoo...

[chii]

because opera is a good browser. especially on mobile. I expect a service to degrade well even if the platform doesn't fully support all features.