[coldtea]

>I use Opera on the desktop and on my mobile devices. So does my wife.

OK. We just need to find the other 10.

Why do people get out of their way to use some marginal browser when there better both proprietary and open source options available?

Just to add to the web another slightly incompatible rendering engine? Or do they really like the gimmicky extras that Opera offers that much?

[davesims]

Everything I like about FireFox (gestures, tabbed browsing, a reasonable bookmark manager), Opera did first. I used Opera for years back when it flat killed Netscape and IE for features and standards compliance. I only left once FireFox implemented all of the same features I had come to rely on in Opera, PLUS developing its growing add-on ecosystem.

Gimmicky? Marginal? Not in the least. Sure, Opera, as a foreign, small, scrappy little software company wasn't able to knock off the behemoths of MSIE, Google/Chrome and Netscape-cum-Mozilla. But so what? The fact that they've been ahead of the feature curve as long as they have and are still in the fight is, to me, pretty dang amazing and quietly one of the most surprising stories in software in the last 15 years.

I've always been a fan of that resilient little Norwegian shop, and I'm sorry to see them (or, more than likely, their lawyers) get dragged into the unseemly world of lawsuits and recrimination. Hopefully this will resolve itself more amicably than it has started.

EDIT: I don't mean to be snarky or mean, but this bit made me SOL (snort out loud):

  "..another slightly incompatible rendering engine?"

Opera's earliest claim to fame, back in the godawful days of the real incompatibility wars, was its near-religious adherence to W3 standards. A lot of web developers in the late nineties/early oughts would use Opera as the benchmark browser, and then resolve various quirks-mode issues from there. If it worked in Opera, you could be reasonable sure the problem wasn't with your code, but with a quirk that you were about to have to fork your code on, for Netscape or IE.

[devcpp]

Opera might have been ahead in the past, but is it still ahead? Having tried their browser, I must have missed something because I think Firefox with addons is way better.

I find brand fidelity particularly nonsensical when a company is going downhill on the quality of its products.

[claudius]

Compared to Chrom(e|ium), I don’t get crashes on every other website, a decent release cycle, a decent repository and, you know, a browser that does what I want rather than forcing me to want what it does. Oh, and a functional speed dial.

Compared to Firefox, it actually makes decent use of RAM, doesn’t require fifty-five trillions of addons to work remotely properly (and hence doesn’t require updating of said fifty-five trillions of addons every other day) and a decent release cycle.

Oh, it also works on my phone and I just had to copy over wand.dat to get all my passwords there as well :-)

[purple_platypus]

I wouldn't say they're all that terribly behind. I use Opera daily and rarely have issues with websites. The last really big issue I remember was the Twitter fiasco when they found out Presto wasn't prepared for a Javascript file that was larger than average and only had a single statement because replacing semicolons with commas became the cool thing to do.

[coldtea]

>Everything I like about FireFox (gestures, tabbed browsing, a reasonable bookmark manager), Opera did first.

So? Do you still use Mosaic because it did first most of the important things Opera does now? How about sticking with IE, because it brought as AJAX first?

[davesims]

If Mosaic had a current version with a rendering engine and enclosing feature set as competitive as the current Opera is vs. Chrome and FF, yeah I might. But, as I said, I don't even use Opera right now, only because FireFox's add-on ecosystem makes it the better choice. But otherwise Opera is still a competitive, high-performing browser, and completely reasonable choice for the discriminating nerd.

I never used IE. Because...IE.

Would you hypothetically not use a fast, super-compliant, feature-rich Mosaic out of an irrational bias?

[coldtea]

>Would you hypothetically not use a fast, super-compliant, feature-rich Mosaic out of an irrational bias?

No bias. I've tried to use Opera from time to time. Always stopped because:

1) Awkward UI. The QT theme engine it used (still has?) made it always look and feel off, in both Windows and OS X.

2) Some extra features (mail? download manager?) felt subpar compared to dedicated apps. Why would I need those in a browser anyway? That's why I stopped using Mozilla for Firefox 5-6 years ago.

3) The main operation of any browser, err, browsing web pages, was frequently hit with bugs, incompatibilities etc. I was always left out when browsing the more advanced HTML5 stuff, what with WebGL etc. And I never particularly liked the font rendering.

Some stuff I did like. But an incompatible engine and a bad look & feel didn't really entice me to keep using a browser. Mouse gestures etc, I could not care less, I find them gimmicky anyway.

[sgift]

> Why do people get out of their way to use some marginal browser when there better both proprietary and open source options available?

This is simple: None are available (for me). They are (take your pick for your specific browser):

  - Slow
  - Memory-inefficient (i.e. they either use too much memory when I need it for other tasks or they use not enough when I don't need it and they could use it to provide a better experience, e.g. faster tab switching)
  - Instable for my use case (50-100 tabs)
  - Have no good mouse gestures (all the plugins for FF suck)
  - ...

[TheDag]

I've used Opera for a long time, and when I started using it it was simply alone on top of a lot of crap browsers. Now there are several decent alternatives, all of which are very frustrating for me. I work on multiple computers and have multiple computers at home. I'm lazy. Hence, no plugins should be required, so I get the experience I want installing just the browser.

For the most part Chrome or Fox or even IE10 behave similarly enough that I can almost use them instead of Opera. I think there's just 2 exceptions. Whenever I use another browser I find myself getting frustrated with 2 things: (1) Nothing happens when I "roll-left" over the mouse buttons (navigate back). (2) Tabs MORONICALLY cycle left-to-right, rather than in most recently used order. Both are show-stoppers for me, and I don't care if a plug-in can fix it, as long as Opera is otherwise more or less on par with the alternatives.

[coldtea]

So the public for Opera is bizarro outliers? (100 tabs! Love of mouse gestures!)

[stinos]

I acknowledge your point on the tabs, but not on the gestures. It provides a genius way execute actions, probably faster than anything else. I would almost say that is a fact, and that if you don't agree then it's because you haven't used it.

[qu4z-2]

I'm still using firefox because of pentadactyl. It lets you switch to a tab by substring search of title/url.

If you have 100 tabs open (I often do too) how do you switch to a specific tab with mouse gestures?

(Genuinely curious; seems a shame to have to specify, but I don't want to be misunderstood)

[claudius]

At 7 billion people on this planet, there well may be enough ‘bizarro outliers’ who don’t want a Mac OS X-like browsing experience to justify a special browser.

[stinos]

- Have no integrated mail system

[oblique63]

Aside from the other reasons already mentioned here, I'd like to point out that it's also the only browser that seems to have a competent 64-bit implementation for Windows at the moment. This is literally the only reason I migrated to Opera not too long ago.

I have 16gb of ram on my pc, and regularly have >100 tabs open at any given time; I may be in a weird minority of some sort, but decent x64 support really makes my life a lot easier. I still load up Chrome and Firefox when I know I'm only going to be using them for a short/quick session, but as much as I like them, they just become awfully painful to use beyond that use case for me. Unfortunately, it seems Opera is following suit with the other vendors and is probably abandoning its x64 version, but at least they were the one vendor that pursued it enough to release something usable. Waterfox and the 'official' x64 builds of Firefox crash way too much for me to even consider. I understand the hell of trying to port to a 64-bit architecture when you're reliant on tons of old 32-bit libraries and such, but I really don't like this trend of staying overly complacent in the 32-bit realm when our hardware has been capable of more for a good while now...

When I'm on Linux however: Chromium all the way!

[jarek]

> Why do people get out of their way to use some marginal browser when there better both proprietary and open source options available?

What is your apparently universal definition of "better," please?

[kamaal]

I've never tried, let alone use Opera. I just keep hearing something like that exists.

For now it feels like a 'me too' product which simply exists in the market.

[jarek]

Was this meant to be a response to my question to `coldtea, or a general comment? The exact same words could be used by an IE user describing Chrome, or a Windows user describing OS X. They make no reference to "better."

(Not to mention that Opera - the source tree and the product - is older than most of major browsers today, so technically others are the "me too" products...)

[kamaal]

As I replied in another thread, older means nothing.

Most young people don't even care about an era when there parents read news on Emacs.

[jarek]

May I ask why you replied specifically to my comment if your statement wasn't addressing anything I said?

[ibrahima]

I haven't used Opera on desktop in probably a decade, but it's been around since before Mozilla. How is it a 'me too' product?

[kamaal]

Note most people(young) might not even be aware of the era you are talking about.

They might be the first to do something. But so was AOL to many things. Who(or how many compare to their competitors) uses AOL these days?

[ibrahima]

I'm probably what most people would consider young (22), but I see your point. But 'me too' has a very specific connotation of entering a market late because everyone is doing it, at least to me, which is the opposite of what Opera has done.

[manojlds]

Opera were the pioneers of the tab, speed dial and many things. They are by no means "me too".

[Osiris]

Or do they really like the gimmicky extras that Opera offers that much?

This. I started using Opera long before Chrome even existed. A basic thing: Hold the right-mouse button and click the left. It takes you back to the previous page. Chrome still doesn't do that.

It's the UI that I prefer, not the rendering engine.

The major reason that I use Opera is the built-in mail client. I have half a dozen email accounts and using multi-account login in Gmail is a bit of a pain. Having the email client built into the browser checks all my accounts for me (using IMAP) so I have one "Unread" tab open instead of 6 Gmail tabs.

[Tomek_]

Exactly. I'm trying to use other browsers too and stuff like these, like the way how ctrl+tab works, or, especially!!!, tabs thumbnails (seriously, this is the best thing ever) are keeping me coming back to Opera

[MertsA]

Uhh, maybe you should try that in Chrome. The very first item on the drop down menu that comes up is the back button and no you don't need to release right click to click on it. Also, it's even faster than Opera, you can just right click and then release it over back and not have to left click at all.

[mcintyre1994]

It's not using 'back'. It's a 'rocker' gesture to navigate between tabs. Right click anywhere, then left click while holding it, move to the left tab. And vice versa.

[tripzilch]

I may be confused what you're referring to, but switching between tabs is right click + scroll wheel.

[statictype]

Why do people get out of their way to use some marginal browser when there better both proprietary and open source options available?

Why do people go out of their way to use a marginal operating system when there are better both proprietary and open source options available? Just to add another completely incompatible platform for developers to target? Or do they really like the gimmicky extras (like genie-animated minimizations)?

(Note: Not making fun of the Mac, which I use everyday. Making for of the parent poster for his narrow-minded view point)

[Jam0864]

Opera Mini has a proxy server it uses to compress data before it reaches your device. This is extremely useful when using mobile data because it's both faster and cheaper. (At least, in Australia, where mobile Internet is both slow and expensive)

[purple_platypus]

The desktop browser has the same thing (under the term Opera Turbo). Really useful when you're on a bad connection.

[6d0debc071]

> Why do people get out of their way to use some marginal browser when there better both proprietary and open source options available?

Integrated notes, integrated mail, clean interface. I've been using it since it was really early and while I can do similar things with other browsers I need a bunch of plugins to do so.

Automatic synchronisation of bookmarks and note across all my devices....

[Freaky]

Going out of my way would be switching browsers when I'm happy with the one I've used since 2001.

I use Chrome for flash and video because its architecture grants it a good bonus in responsiveness, but that comes at a high cost in memory consumption. I also consider it unsuitable for general use because it's so painfully unconfigurable. I can't even have a vertical tab bar, so I'm always left guessing what tab's what by their favicon and the first word of their title - a pretty major deal breaker for me.

I sometimes give Firefox a go, and while I find the range and power of its extensions very attractive, it somehow always fails to quite click for me. I'm sure I could get used to it, but while Opera's giving me much the same functionality in what I consider a nicer package, and with more provided out of the box, why go out of my way to switch? You might as well ask why I still use vim when emacs is clearly so much "better".

Not sure what other alternatives you'd have me use. IE? Safari? Neither are realistic options to consider for obvious reasons.

[tdignan]

Not too long ago, opera was one of the best mobile browsers for Android... That was before google released a decent mobile build of chrome.

[PavlovsCat]

Because Opera has

a.) a bookmark manager that doesn't suck (split view for life) b.) configuration dialogs that aren't boiled down to the utter newbie minimum, and a context menu that actually has a bunch of things in it c.) a GUI that's configurable like play-doh (even more so if you get into .ini files as well) d.) if that's your thing, there are skins available for it that seriously maximize screen estate

What are you calling gimmicky? And are all the CLI commands unix comes with gimmicks for you, too? Do you consider having more than one mouse button a gimmick as well? Heh.

[papsosouid]

I don't pay much attention to usernames, and yet I constantly see yours. Because virtually every post you make is totally non-constructive and unnecessary. Please stop. I am tired of reading absolute trash posts like that and thinking "gee, bet its coldtea again".