Linked by Kroc Camen on Fri 18th Sep 2009 18:51 UTC
You all know that I don't particularly like Opera. I find the product to be lacking polish, over-complicated and without the marketing pizazz that has made Firefox a household name. That's just my personal opinion, and that opinion has garnered many complaints of unjustness. To that end, to present a fairer discussion I would like to put a simple question to the community: "What should Opera do?".
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Member since:2005-11-16
It was fast but it had a major downside which is that there were a lot of websites that it rendered incorrectly. Of course you can blame web developers or IE6 but it didn't change the fact that a lot of websites were incompatible with Opera. There were also a lot of goverment and bank sites that required IE.
A bit of an exaggeration. I remember MSN, some online banks, and a handful of other sites not working in Opera, along with a small percentage of others that weren't rendered perfectly. The other 99.999% of sites were just fine in Opera.
I could browse for weeks without hitting a site that had to be loaded in IE. Even then, copying and pasting a link into a different browser wasn't much of a hassle, not compared with missing out on Opera's speed and amazing features the rest of the time.
Of course, with hindsight, Opera should have made it free, marketed it better, and pushed for all the market share they could get. Messing about with advertising banners was a big mistake that put off many users. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't a fantastic value product considering all its advantages over the alternatives.
What's $20 compared with hours of saved time and far more comfortable and enjoyable browsing? If it was a choice between IE6 and Firefox then I'd have paid money for Firefox too.
Member since:
2009-08-26
It was fast but it had a major downside which is that there were a lot of websites that it rendered incorrectly. Of course you can blame web developers or IE6 but it didn't change the fact that a lot of websites were incompatible with Opera. There were also a lot of goverment and bank sites that required IE.
If they charged less or not at all they could have built up a better install base like FF which in turn encouraged more websites to be FF compatible.
People didn't want to pay $20 for a browser that wasn't a complete replacement.