Skip navigation.

exploreopera

| Help

Sign up | Help

Opera also has a million...

Tuesday, 21. September 2004, 01:03:02

,

The Firefox 1.0 preview is getting a good press in parts of the blogosphere, and they celebrate a millionth download in a few days. But I wonder why they want to advertise this preview release so broadly; when the final comes they have to step it up. Because that is the build that everyone is supposed to use to replace MSIE. Firefox will indeed need big download numbers to increase marketshare outside the geeky circle of webconnaisseurs.

Opera has a slightly different focus. We want to make it as simple as possible to use a plethora of net-related functionality in an easy to use package. People who are not into heavy webbrowsing might not be that interested, though Opera is continously trying to broaden its appeal by making the interface simpler again. But they have a chance to encounter Opera anyway on their mobile phone:

http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2004/09/20/

About Opera's growing file size...Updated setups (toolbars, menus and shortcuts) for 7.5

Comments

avatar
It's funny to me how an inferior non-profit browser can get all this publicity while a superior product like Opera straggles in the background. I just don't get it. Still mystified by all this Firefox hype .... I have kept up with Firefox since it was Phoenix 0.4 and try to get it working as well as Opera each version and give it proper time to familiarize myself with it and still never even come close to Opera's overall brilliance with Firefox.

Firefox is okay and is arguably better than IE, if only for security reasons, possibly, but its reliance on 3rd-party extensions for what I consider to be essential functionality after using Opera is often problematic and frustrating due to conflicts with other extensions or Firefox or the delay in getting updated extensions for Firefox updates so very often.

It seems to me that when a product is truly superior and still lags behind the competition to such a degree as Opera does, one must seriously question the marketing of Opera. I'm not a marketing guru, but something needs to change, it seems, to get Opera on the radar screen.

By TreeGo, # 21. September 2004, 01:03:02

avatar
The reason Firefox is popular is because it is a drop in replacement with IE, with about the same amount of features. Most new users want simple, and want it to look identical to IE, and Firefox was built for this very purpose.

By Naelphin, # 21. September 2004, 01:03:02

Write a comment

You must be logged in to write a comment. if you're not a registered member, please sign up.

September 2008
SMTWTFS
August 2008October 2008
123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
282930

Opera tweaking

Shared Items

  • Web Apps Need More UI, Not Less

    I haven’t used Chrome yet, though I know people who work on it, and it looks like a good browser with some good new ideas. But I’m unsure of the benefits of one of its main talking points: that what web applications really need is to have less browser “chrome” around them. As I put it in an ...

  • Tested: Google Chrome vs Opera vs Safari | News | ...

    Safari isn't a bad browser, but on the PC it's not a great one, either. Whether it's arrogance, laziness or a combination of the two, the interface that works so well on the Mac looks completely out of place (the word we'd use is "minging") on XP or Vista, and while the browser itself does the essen ...

  • Intelligence in the Cloud

    There's a general misconception as to what, exactly, the "cloud" really is. I think most people imagine it as just a large cluster of computers, hooked up together as a large database or map/reduce storage system sitting behind a load balancer so that it can respond to requests as scalably as possi ...

  • EU pays for, then ignores study on copyright exten ...

    An academic from the University of Amsterdam is seething after the European Commission requested several reports from him, then utterly failed to mention them as it proposed a 45-year copyright term extension that he had argued against. Read More...

  • Mousers vs. Keyboardists

    Since the dawn of the graphical user interface there has been tension between those that favor the mouse and those that favor the keyboard. I am reminded of this as I explored the new experimental Firefox plugin from Mozilla Labs called Ubiquity . Ubiquity was designed by human interface designer ...

Interesting