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Except for the fact that Opera does TOO MUCH. That's what's been putting people off. "Opera 12 released, washes your laundry!"

Seriously, Opera doesn't gain a lot of market share because it tries to be too much. I want a browser, not an emailtorrentbrowser with a doomsday device built-in. Sure, you an turn it all off, but why go through all that hassle when I can simply download Firefox (or Chrome) and get what I wanted all the time: a webbrowser.

That argument would make sense, if it weren't for the fact that evidence suggests the majority of users want more than a browser. Consider the number of, and popularity of Firefox add-ons and how many people would argue that this is what gives it the edge. As for Opera being more bloated, it is a smaller download, and occupies a smaller footprint once installed, so please tell me what makes it bloated? I'm not saying Opera is perfect, there are issues I would like to see resolved, but I do think that claiming its trouble with being generally adopted is due to its feature-set, or interface is oversimplified and inaccurate.

**As a side point, every customer I've ever introduced to Opera I've also introduced to Firefox, to get them away from IE, and every single one uses Opera as their preferred browser.**

Uh? I use Opera as a webbrowser, I couldn't care less that it also integrates email/torrent, if memory serves those functionalities cost me the grand total of two clicks to disable them (and a little HDD space)..

People don't use Opera because their marketing|advertising suck, that's all.

I plan to switch to Chrome once I've stress-tested it a little more because I care about open source (but not enough to keep using FF as I found it too unreliable), their page zoom isn't as good as Opera's one though (not sure if it is a deal breaker, I don't use it that often).

Sorry for this, but: LOL?!

The Opera download is smaller than Firefox: 5 MB Opera as opposed to 7 MB Firefox. Their memory and CPU usage is similar. The mail client is 1 (ONE!111!one!!1) entry in a submenu. The RSS client is not in sight too. The Bittorrent client is pretty decent, and easy to disable.

Stop spreading FUD please. Firefox user here

Edited 2008-09-04 14:16 UTC

It's called competition. If opera wants to stay in the browser market then it needs to improve its browser to compete with Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft.

and let's not forget Apple [the main contributor to the webkit/khtml engine that Chrome is based off of] ....

Improve it?? As Thom said, Opera is major overkill for a browser. Hell, it's got more than SeaMonkey, and that's an entire suite of software!

Granted, Chrome does seem to be heavily influenced by Opera, but I also see hints of Firefox, NetPositive and Safari in there too. Should Mozilla, Access/Palm and Apple claim infringement along with Opera and go after Google? Personally, I don't think so; innovation starts with taking someone else's good ideas and making them better. I would hope that Opera, Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple see this as a challenge to improve their own products, both for their own profits and for the benefit of the users as well.

That's what's so confusing and frustrating.

It seems Opera really doesn't get the credit they deserve.

The Register article that poundsmack linked to, for example. People are raving about features in Chrome that have been in Opera for years.

Opera has features X, Y, and Z and it's no big deal. But Google releases a browser with X, Y, and Z, or Firefox adds X, Y, and Z and suddenly those are the best features ever.

I guess I'm just whining, but it really seems like Opera gets the short end of the stick.

Opera seems to be doing OK in the embedded browser space. If Opera wants to stay in the desktop browser market, it needs to get some better marketing. Opera 9.5 is in every way a fine browser and could easily compete with all the others. The problem is that most people have barely heard of it and even those who have don't know of any compelling reason to try it.

How about this wonderful issue - fix the damn incompatibility issues with Google services; Blogspot for example, the copy and paste into the rich text box doesn't work properly, uploading to YouTube is unreliable and on occasions just doesn't work.

Then there is Photobucket, again, the uploader doesn't work properly - then there are numerous incompatibilities and basically the half assed port on operating systems other than Windows.

So please, tell me, why does 'Opera' deserve marketshare when it can't even get the most basic of things correct - namely, rendering large mainstream sites correctly. I wouldn't care if this was some nameless website in the whop-whops, but we're talking about big name mainstream websites.

Is it perhaps because Opera is too standards compliant? Quite a few mainstream sites "break the rules" because the most common renderers are broken and the designer's target is to make sure it renders well on the common browsers. Opera, despite having an good track record of standards compliance, has too little share out there to be considered worth the effort to get it to render in Opera properly.

Well, that's what I think anyway.

Bitter much?
Good thing Opera is completely made out of original ideas, eh?

I've long noticed an inverse relationship between the market share of a product and the... err... enthusiasm of its fans.

even though he thinks that imitation is flattery, this browser will take what market share opera would have rightfully deserved by having the same if not better feature set and push opera further away from general public knowledge.

Having all the possible features does not a browser better than another one. it's HOW those features are implemented. And as for the "rightfully deserved market share"..well, I can just say that I don't like Opera. It's ugly and feels pretty bloated. But I immediately liked Chrome. If what you said was true then I would have used Opera before.

Gotta agree with most other people, Opera tries to be all things to all people. I'm not saying thats a bad thing but I for one don't really like Opera.

I did take a look at Chrome and I really didn't like it either but if I only had the two to pick from I would go with Chrome over Opera.

Basically what's being said here is that Opera has some serious usability issues that really turn a lot of people off. And instead of fixing these issues so that more people would want to use it, Opera is more content with crying to the EU and blaming their lack of marketshare on Microsoft.

Personally, I use it because of its rad text-to-speech, but that is the ONLY reason. Trying to move my profile to a separate partition is an exercise in ini hell. Even after tweaking the hell out of opera6.ini, I've got half the files where I want them and the other half still in my user profile folder. I finally just gave up.

Same with trying to configure for single user in Vista (to try and make the above just a little easier). Following the instructions, I got an error every time I start the browser that the mail engine couldn't initiate because Opera apparently doesn't know what UAC is. (The only program so far that has given me any trouble with UAC.) Apparently, you have to download the 'classic' installer to make this work in Vista or run as Administrator... I dunno, it's just one big clusterf**k.

Seriously, if I wanted to spend an endless amount of time hacking config files and pulling my hair out, I'd just install Linux I really, really hate this browser.