How to make Opera 10 more successful (popular) ? Please give your ideas.

How to make Opera 10 more successful (popular) ? Please give your ideas.

OK, we will have another opera version (opera 10) in few months. I assume it will be loaded with cool innovative features as usual and will drive us crazy in the forum. Some people will feel excited while others no so happy (may feel like worst version ever). Some will threaten that if "this feature or bug" is not fixed, he/she will switch to firefox the next morning. So the developers hsould work overnight to fix it. This is normal and happened in the past. Fine.

My biggest concern is: Will opera be able to break out of its unpopular image and become successful in that sense? This has not happened in last 10 years given the outstanding quality of this browser. Simply it is painful, at least for me as an opera user, to see such a great product to be not in the top fo the list in people's choice.

I have written many threads like this one in the past about the marketing side of it. There are numerous threads which talk about technical side of things which might affect user's decision to use it (such as site not working with opera, unfamiliar interface, can't find features that I am used in my other browser etc). So, actually, two major aspects of it : Marketing a developed product and develpoing a product to meet users expectation to some extent that they choose to use it. Although, both of these has to do with opera's own business decision and users have little to say. Still I thought it might be a great idea to give it a shot one more time to see if opera 10 can make any difference.

Sorry for the long post but I wanted to make my intentions clear. No bashing but constructive ideas along with criticism may be what is needed here. Please feel free to contribute all your ideas (in marketing and tech side) that might help break the obstacles and make opera 10 a success.

Thanks. Enjoy opera.

I'm not sure marketing is so much of an issue. IMO, the biggest block to Opera's take-up is the number of sites that for whatever reason, do not work, or work unreliably. Those reasons are many and varied, sometimes it's Opera, usually it's the web site. Sadly, it's always Opera's problem, whether it's their fault or not, whether they can actually do anything about it or not.

I've lost count of the number of times I've been on web building forums and read posts that state that a website has been tested in IE, Firefox & Safari but they don't mention Opera. I point it out when things that don't work in Opera and offer solutions, but half the time I'm ignored. I think the feeling is that because a low percentage of people use Opera, many developers simply don't bother to test in it.

Some things I will try to focus on or think Opera in general should focus on for and beyond O10..

• Site compat work - we have some pretty good tools but could perhaps make even better use of them, including more community involvement.
  
  
• Recruiting even more Elektrans and volunteers - deeper involvement with power users.
  
  
• Getting user-centric and/or user-powered marketing right.
  
  
• Making Dragonfly rock solid and turn it into a tool that web developers will crave working with - web sites tested with Opera will follow naturally when we have a developer tool web devs will want to use.
  
  
• Getting the auto-update running so that users like me can install Opera for less computer-literate friends and know it will stay up-to-date. (With some of my aquintances I can tell from the Opera version on their machine when I last visited..)
  
  
• Focusing usability efforts somehow. I don't know much about usability studies but it would be interesting to try to chart and document a number of Opera newbies' road to being familiar with the browser, and see how many stumbling stones we could remove from that road. (Some of the stones would be considered features by power users - that's the way it's always been, and it's incredibly difficult to balance everyone's needs. So glad I'm not a UI designer..)
  

Originally posted by tupence:

I've lost count of the number of times I've been on web building forums and read posts that state that a website has been tested in IE, Firefox & Safari but they don't mention Opera. I point it out when things that don't work in Opera and offer solutions, but half the time I'm ignored. I think the feeling is that because a low percentage of people use Opera, many developers simply don't bother to test in it.

It's more than that though - usually these developers all just write rubbish code, and can't be 'bothered' to write code that's worth a damn - see my most recent blog entries for proof enough of that.

They copypasta bad code from unrelated sources together using 1997 style markup mixed with new-fangled 'gee ain't it neat' technologies they don't even understand, then stand around crying "But it works in FF" just like they used to stand around crying "But it works in IE"

What we need to start doing is riding the backsides of major websites who's code is rubbish - pointing out that if they bothered to USE separation of presentation from content, semantic markup, minimalism of code and graceful degredation in mind, 99.99% of these cross browser 'problems' would be non-issues, their sites would consume significantly less bandwidth, and when next months flavor of the month browser comes along nothing breaks. The new hotmail, Bank of America detecting Opera 10 alpha as Opera 1.0, It's all garbage code from lazy incompetant nimrods.

If you understand HTML and CSS, Do a view source on ebay, MSN, google, any major bank, and then sit there wondering how the **** these people got their jobs in the first place, much less are allowed to keep them... Though I cover that in Rubbish Code, Take II - their bosses don't know any better and unless we start telling them so loudly and in numbers this type of ineptitude will continue to be tolerated from developers.

I'm starting to think that we should just take their jobs from them. Seriously - back in the old Old OLD days a conquering culture would literally "breed out" an occupied culture that refused to accept the new rules. Often called prima noctes, or the "Lord's Privilege", the local noble would literally bed a newlywed bride on the night of her wedding in the hopes of getting her pregnant and propogating the conquering culture's bloodlines in the native population (which has the unfortunate side effect of diluting the native bloodlines).

We could do the same, but in the workforce. Companies are hurting for cash right now - and looking for ways to save money. What if we were to find out how much these employees were being paid (salary, benefits, insurance, taxes and so forth), find out what the real per employee cost is, and then offer the companies a contract to replace them with us at a lower cost? Yes, I'm talking about contracting here. At worst, the company would probably save about 25% on their employment costs. Depending on who gets hired, they could save as much as 75%.

We'd come in, replace the employees, and rebuidl the Web sites the right way so that they're not only free from decade old software and coding architectures, but also scalable, future-proof (or at least future-resistant), and work on all modern browsers due to having been built in accordance with the specification, tested against all four major rendering engines, and using feature detection instead of browser sniffing where appropriate.

Heck, while we're at it we could also lower their hosting costs since they'd be using far fewer server resources to dish up those Web pages to visitors, improve their search engine rankings naturally without any BS SEO schemes, make the sites accessible to everyone regardless of disability or user agent preference, and of course - since we'd have to justify this SOMEHOW to these hypothetical clients - increase their conversion rates and sales to the point where they're not just going through the roof, but also sending their profit margins to the stars.

Okay okay, I'll stop dreaming. What can we REALLY do with what we have available that will work today, and not ten years from now when either Firefox or Chrome has unseated Internet Explorer as the dominant browser and we're still the forgotten kid that's locked away in a closet only to be dragged out and beaten when convenient? (Before anyone takes offense to the forgotten kid remark - that's how I grew up. It hurts when you're a child and you hear "Oh, he's just here for the food" and "If we didn't bring him with us, DCFS would take him." at family reunions and other get-togethers.)

Yes, I'm about to get serious here. Anyone who knows me from elsewhere will probably be more than happy to tell you I have a twisted sense of humor - and it showed. I'm putting that aside now.

I keep hearing of three major strikes against Opera. A lack of marketing (seriously, word of mouth only gets you so far - start advertising), a user interface that's hard to use, and of course junk code from other Web sites that keep messing up what is by far the best browser on the planet. The first two we can take care of with what we have.

First, why doesn't Opera provide a CD with the latest copy of Opera and a handy "how-to" guide to its mobile customers? The desktop browser is free, so even if the mobile users don't want the CD, they could always share it with someone they know. Opera could also solicit reviews in the major trade magazines and start a grassroots campaign to spread the word about the browser - much the way Firefox has done. Give people an incentive to recommend Opera to their friends. Should we get tacky and start paying people via affiliate lilnks? I don't think it's necessary, but find out what people want and give it to them.

The second thing we need to fix is the user interface. I understand that Peregrine is getting a face lift, but rather than waiting for the final release, release the new interface with the beta. Opera's betas are just as good as if not better than the other browsers' final releases, so this would be a great time to get some actual feedback from people. Just as with my first suggestion, reward those who participate in the testing and feedback sessions with something - whether it's Opera swag, a gift certificate redeemable at Borders or Barnes & Noble - or even cash. Give people an incentive. This will also tie in with and reinforce my first suggestion (advertise, advertise, advertise!).

As an aside, perhaps Opera could also make it easier for developers to extend the browser to meet their needs (via the widgets). Perhaps a competition to create the best widgets for particular categories/needs? Whoever wins gets their feature incorporated into the browser and they in turn get recognized as a contributer (Feature X was developed by John Smith of www.johnsmithwidgets.com for Opera Software...). Anything (within reason of course) Opera can do to build a larger, more diverse and better community.

If we do these two (okay, three) things, chances are that Opera's usage numbers will skyrocket. Instead of "30 million people" not being "enough to consider targeting" we could have 150 million people - that's half the (known) population of the United States! Get enough people using Opera, get enough developers and industry "experts" (I use that term loosely) to recognize and recommend it, and maybe - just maybe - we can finally force those old dinosaurs who still code like it's 1995 to sit up, take notice and learn how to code for the 21st Century.

Of course, there is always the alternative (see above in the part where I was joking)...

As usualy, Dan's pretty much spot on, though where he's joking I'd be looking at that seriously.

Originally posted by Dan Schulz:

As an aside, perhaps Opera could also make it easier for developers to extend the browser to meet their needs (via the widgets). Perhaps a competition to create the best widgets for particular categories/needs?

This is where BOTH FF and IE kick Opera's backside. Firefox plugins and IE ActiveX controls go so much further into letting you control the browser than anything we're able to do in Opera. Widgets are tinkertoys by comparison for a host of reasons - I have some really nice widget ideas that would SUCK under Opera for the simple fact that once initialized widgets are a fixed size. Lemme have the option to make it a real window operating as a tab!

Give us more control over the browser functions in our widgets... or give us a REAL plugin system. Number one reason you didn't win over the people who are going to firefox is that they have REAL plugins.

Then there's dragonfly - it tries too hard to work like Firebug, in all the wrong ways. Give it it's own tab, let me DETACH that tab to it's own window so I can put it on another display if available - one of the whole reasons opera's tabs kick everyone else's backside is you can DETACH them. Give us a tab under it that actually shows the DOCUMENTS and a list of the elements in the page with their filesizes. Expand it to include a lot of what the Web Developer Toolbar for FF can do or give us equivalents. (which I use a HELL of a lot more than either Firebug or Dragonfly - but then BOTH are useless for me working on properly written sites, it's only debugging the rubbish most other developers vomit up and try to pass off as code I need a DOM inspector) - or give us the ability to BUILD something like that.

Other little things - make the opera cache actually USEFUL by integrating the ability to sort by column, show the date and time, etc, etc. Yes I'm aware there's a user .js to do this, I'm saying we shouldn't NEED to do that for what is simple basic functionality.

... and you know I'm going to commit a major heresy here given what people seem to have been saying about the upcoming Opera 10 changes - QUIT FUTZING WITH THE BLOODY UI. There was NOTHING wrong with it in the past apart from it being a little different from the rest - frankly it's no different from IE and FF than FF is from IE. One of the big touted features coming with Opera 10 is WASTING TIME ON YET ANOTHER reskinning of the bloody program instead of just fixing the underlying issues that make coders not like supporting it in the first place - like absolute positioning inside inline-block being broken. This is a complaint I make about most every software that they feel like every single version has to be reskinned - just confusing existing users, wasting time on something that wasn't broken in the first place and wasting manpower that could be better spent elsewhere.

You could also strive to make the site more of a showcase of web standards and the coding practices that make sites work better in ALL browsers with less effort. Divitus, classitus, inlined styling, inlined CSS, unneccessary classes on spans that are inside ID's, presentational id's and classes, absurdly undersized fixed metric fonts in a fixed width layout (case in point I have to zoom in to 160% to make this site useful on my desktop), complete failures at WCAG, accessability and graceful degredation? Seriously when you are serving 20K+ of markup, 20k of CSS and 24k of javascript for less than 2k of page content, something is really wrong.

It continues to bother me no end that the website for one of the most standards compliant browsers, one bragging about it's 100/100 on Acid3 in the next version continues to be one of the worst examples at good coding and accessability on the web.

On the marketing side opera probably need to ask themselves first why the name of firefox could reach to the Moe and Joes who know the name of firefox at least (may or may not use it) but never heard of opera although it existed for more than 10 years.
Also, reaching to the big corporate/banks/popular sites might be a starting point to educating old fashion web designers.

To me, it is very important if not the most important part of it. otherwise, another great release might go in vain.

@deathshadow: Re Dragonfly in a window. Click the "undock" button next to the close button.

Since when did this forum turn into a wishlist forum? I thought this part of the forum was here to talk about what OPERA USERS can do, not what you want Opera to add to the browser

Originally posted by Dan Schulz:

A lack of marketing

Do you know anything about what kind of marketing Opera does?

First, why doesn't Opera provide a CD with the latest copy of Opera and a handy "how-to" guide to its mobile customers?

What mobile customers? The end users or businesses?

Opera could also solicit reviews in the major trade magazines and start a grassroots campaign to spread the word about the browser

What makes you think Opera hasn't already tried or done this?

So basically, what do you know about what Opera is doing marketing wise, and what exactly do you expect them to do?

The second thing we need to fix is the user interface.

What exactly? It looks like any other browser out there already.

As an aside, perhaps Opera could also make it easier for developers to extend the browser to meet their needs (via the widgets). Perhaps a competition to create the best widgets for particular categories/needs?

First: widgets don't extend the browser.

Second: they've had tons of widget competitions already.

If we do these two (okay, three) things, chances are that Opera's usage numbers will skyrocket.

Yeah, right. "If we do these vague things that I don't really know much about..." is not exactly convincing. Sorry, dude. I mean, you don't even know what kind of marketing Opera is doing, and all you had to say apart from that was a vague "fix the UI"...

Originally posted by deathshadow:

As usualy, Dan's pretty much spot on

That's not what you said later:

QUIT FUTZING WITH THE BLOODY UI. - frankly it's no different from IE and FF than FF is from IE.

He thought it was too different and difficult and wants them to change it!

But when you guys write these huge and pointless rants it's no wonder than no one really reads it

Widgets are tinkertoys by comparison for a host of reasons

Widgets aren't SUPPOSED to be like extensions....

One of the big touted features coming with Opera 10 is WASTING TIME ON YET ANOTHER reskinning of the bloody program instead of just fixing the underlying issues that make coders not like supporting it in the first place - like absolute positioning inside inline-block being broken. This is a complaint I make about most every software that they feel like every single version has to be reskinned - just confusing existing users, wasting time on something that wasn't broken in the first place and wasting manpower that could be better spent elsewhere.

You are the one wasting your time.

First of all, you are clearly severly lacking in knowledge on the subject. Looks MATTER, whether you like it or not.

Secondly, the skin is irrelevant to the actual rendering engine. Do you really think the guy who designs the skin is the same guy who works on implementing CSS???

Less bugs would be nice

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

Since when did this forum turn into a wishlist forum? I thought this part of the forum was here to talk about what OPERA USERS can do, not what you want Opera to add to the browser

In other words god forbid anyone say something negative or make suggestions. Yup, status quo FTW - not.

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

Do you know anything about what kind of marketing Opera does?

Dan probably doesn't - I sure don't, and do you know WHY? Because we sure as shine don't see anything resembling marketing!!! Can't open up a magazine or go to a tech website without being flooded by firefox adverts... Opera? Lucky if it gets a one sentence mention every six months. LANDS SAKE the not for profit Mozilla group runs Firefox TV SPOTS! Opera is supposed to be a commercial venture - whiskey tango foxtrot, over?

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

What makes you think Opera hasn't already tried or done this?

That you don't see it anywhere! If they have tried it then it must have been a half assed attempt that nobody noticed. I kind of disagree wtih Dan on the grassroots thing as what I'm saying is hire a real international marketing firm, and do a proper push. If a non-profit can pull it off, a for profit has NO EXCUSE.

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

What exactly? It looks like any other browser out there already.

While YES, I disagree with Dan on 'fixing the UI' I also would NOT say it 'looks like any other browser' - and that's NOT neccessarily a bad thing. "Pretty much" does not mean "agree 100% with every little detail"

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

First: widgets don't extend the browser.

Which is why they are tinkertoys and goofy rubbish. What we need are extensions.

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

Second: they've had tons of widget competitions already.

Which didn't get covered by a single source outside opera.com to my knowledge. Hell they don't even seem to get slashdotted or even on digg. (Mind you I hate getting Digg links, but I understand it from a marketing standpoint as a neccessary evil these days)

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

That's not what you said later:

Because god forbid I agree with the intent but not the details.

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

But when you guys write these huge and pointless rants it's no wonder than no one really reads it

IF you found that huge and pointless, you must have comprehension issues - that or you are just trolling because 'OH NOES' someone said something negative or is coming away with an impression different from your own. M SRY, M8Y 1 R1T3 n L33t U Ndr5t4nd?

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

Widgets aren't SUPPOSED to be like extensions....

But it's all we have. THAT'S THE PROBLEM AND THE POINT I WAS MAKING. Sad part is if you expanded the DOM available to widget programmers to give more hooks to the browser, gave them fuller control over the window the widgets operate in, much of what is done under FF as extensions COULD be implemented as widgets! (albeit the code would be a bit slow given you'd be relying on .js for everything)... Just be sure those javascript hooks are only available to user side script and not the javascript for websites, and you'd be fine.

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

You are the one wasting your time.

Oh yes, it's always a waste of time pointing out what's wrong. We should all just get together in a giant dirty hippy hug-fest drum circle to sing kumbaya. It's all good, no need to worry about anything or complain about things you see as wrong.

To quote George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

First of all, you are clearly severly lacking in knowledge on the subject.

My decade of working in marketing and development and three decades of programming says different.

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

Looks MATTER, whether you like it or not.

Looks are flash in the pan quick draws that just as quickly dissapoint if that's all you bring to the table. Polish, shine and a can of bondo may look pretty when properly sanded, primed and buffed, but it means nothing if you don't cut away the rust first.

Anyone here remember John's frozen pizza from the 80's? They had the jingle with the little kid singing in a cute soprano "My verymost favorite pizza's name is " then a swap to a deep baritone "JOHNS". They ran the advert for three months before it went on shelves, and sold record numbers when it finally arrived.

They went out of business a month later because despite the cooked product looking and smelling attractive, and a extremely successful marketing campaign, elementary school cafeteria pizza tasted better. (Which when foam rubber with ketchup on a sea biscuit is an improvement).

It's called polishing a turd. Look around the web at some of the most popular websites - many of them have appearances that would make your average Ikea buying Saab driving Apple loving art... types (I'll be polite) go into epileptic shock. E-Bay? Amazon? The disaster of the average mySpace page? These are NOT attractive websites where I would be flabberghasted if the commercial ones spent more than 20 minutes on the graphics they hung on the layouts.. What they do have is adherance to accessability minimums and content the end user actually gives a **** about. In the early days google was held up for ridicule due to it's 'dated' appearance - today it is held up as a prime example of everything GOOD in accessability and simplicity of design.

Much less we're talking about a user interface here - too radical a change can alienate your existing fanbase, meaning even if you bring new people in, it's a wash for all the people you use. I've seen this same effect in industry after industry and company after company the past three decades.

You see older products do this all the time trying to 'drive' interest in a way that more often than not it bites them in the ass. See every 'reinvisioning' of old movie/TV properties (Day the Earth Stood Still? Enterprise?), product restyling of already saturated brands (Pepsi is doing this right now - EVERYONE knows who pepsi is, spending millions on changing the logo is NOT going to increase sales), and of course the king of the mountain: The rancid swill known as New Coke.

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

Secondly, the skin is irrelevant to the actual rendering engine. Do you really think the guy who designs the skin is the same guy who works on implementing CSS???

No, some art... type in the back room playing with photoshop is not who I'm referring to - I'm talking about the PROGRAMMER needed to IMPLEMENT the pretty pictures, said programmers skills likely being mature enough to be better used doing something meaningful instead.

Made worse by the fact said reskinning is not going to change the layout or introduce new functionality, 99.99% chance of being yet again just another slap new graphics in place of the old ones which there's nothing wrong with... or even better 'breaks' custom buttons making them illegible like the skin for 9.6 did. (which is why I'm running the windows native option)

Originally posted by operafan2006:

On the marketing side opera probably need to ask themselves first why the name of firefox could reach to the Moe and Joes who know the name of firefox at least (may or may not use it) but never heard of opera although it existed for more than 10 years.

Advertisement, advertisements, & more advertisements...

Before GoJoeGo trashed this thread with even more trolling comments, I would like to state that in 2008 I have only seen 2 publicity & 0 advertisement about Opera throughout the whole year (excluded the Internet). Honestly, even a 3 months old browser Google Chrome got more publicities & advertisements than Opera within the last 3 months! How do you expect anyone to know about your existen if you didn't tell them about you? Regular people won't go out the way to search for you unless they know about you.

I did what I could to introduce Opera to many people, but it's really sad to say most people is still have no idea what's Internet browser (even though they used is everyday). However, once they know about it they will gladly abandon IE & adopt a better alternative... So, in most cases it's not about how good or bad Opera is - Opera is already good enough to topple the crappy IE, it's about "awareness"!!! Spent some more $$$ to introduce yourself (outside of the Internet), only then the prospects will know about you & care about you...

Originally posted by deathshadow:

Expand it to include a lot of what the Web Developer Toolbar for FF can do or give us equivalents. (which I use a HELL of a lot more than either Firebug or Dragonfly - but then BOTH are useless for me working on properly written sites, it's only debugging the rubbish most other developers vomit up and try to pass off as code I need a DOM inspector) - or give us the ability to BUILD something like that.

You can try using the Opera Debug Menu. I'm planning to release a version soon of it soon with more stuff added to it. You can even extend or build upon it yourself.

Originally posted by shwetankdixit:

You can try using the Opera Debug Menu. I'm planning to release a version soon of it soon with more stuff added to it. You can even extend or build upon it yourself.

Which is a 'cute' start, but just implements existing functionalities or simple external calls. Filesize and filecount reports? (view document size in FF's web dev) - I don't think you can even implement that without more access to the browser's functionality or offloading it to a server... quick links to resize the entire browser window? Display sizes? View GENERATED source?

A lot of things developers use and really kind of need that I'm not even certain can be done in the current Opera implementation. One of the banes is the most customizable browser out of the box is also the second least expandable. (Webkit based browsers JUST edging opera out on that count)

Originally posted by hallvors:

Focusing usability efforts somehow. I don't know much about usability studies but it would be interesting to try to chart and document a number of Opera newbies' road to being familiar with the browser, and see how many stumbling stones we could remove from that road. (Some of the stones would be considered features by power users - that's the way it's always been, and it's incredibly difficult to balance everyone's needs. So glad I'm not a UI designer..)

This last thing is a simple issue. It's all about making the default user interface very simple. Others you mentioned are more serious and require team work in the company, while this thing I quoted can be blamed on probably one single person.

I don't mean that the default interface layout has not been given attention or work, I'm sure lots of sweat went into it, but the result is bewildering. Opera version 7 had the worst default layout I have seen probably in any program I have worked with. It has improved almost steadily up to the newest versions, but too slowly and with setbacks.

There seems also to be a very bad policy: for example the start bar was first pushed on users by default, then hidden. Or dropping some introduced thingies altogether, like the bookmark star. This policy must be altered. Never push new user interface things on users, particularly if the other browsers don't have it. I don't mean you should absolutely follow the other browsers' layout, but give it a thorough thought. To drop or hide a new feature soon in the next versions must never happen. I must stress this particularly if you intend to introduce autoupdate. This would mean: I will auto-update and my new favourite find in Opera is gone??!!! This policy must be reconsidered.

This goes of course for very old features too, like detached tabs. Why try to please new dumbusers at the cost of old faithful users? Dumbusers will only stay dumb this way and the old faithful users will have less spirit to educate them! Somewhere along versions 8 and 9 there were also lots of updates to the keybord shortcuts for no other reason than to follow Firefox users. This is really annoying to old faithful users. Only at v. 9.5 was the keyboard change done right so that older users could revert back to the earlier keyboard shortcuts.

OK, I vented a lot. But I hope you can see I am not exaggerating anything at all. In my view, one of the key reasons why Opera is not more popular is that the old faithful user base is not given due consideration while changing features in newer versions. The old faithful user base is the most important populariser! Marketing would be the other half, but never more than half in case of such an old program. Stay with old fans.

- Make the default user interface layout simple. Adding buttons is much more fun than deleting them (basic animal psychology).
- Never drop a feature. If you must, provide something else that would do the same. I seriously can't understand why the perfectly functional detach tab feature was removed, for example.

Originally posted by deathshadow:

Filesize and filecount reports? (view document size in FF's web dev) - I don't think you can even implement that without more access to the browser's functionality or offloading it to a server... quick links to resize the entire browser window? Display sizes? View GENERATED source?

File size info you can see by going to sidebar panel->info ; It could be added in the next version, lets see...Resizing the entire browser window at this point is not possible I think....We will have view selection source in the next version....Generated source is a thing for dragonfly....

If you have any more ideas regarding what you might want in the menu, then please let me know...I'm working on it...The first version was just a release to get things started. I'll be adding more and more things in the future...

Originally posted by shwetankdixit:

File size info you can see by going to sidebar panel->info

For the root document only. Doesn't tell me anything about the linked in stylesheets apart from their names, the linked in images apart from their names, etc.

my.opera.com in the 'document Size' info from the FF Web Developer Toolbar. Very handy for seeing just how bad a page is coded or the number of 'wasteful' sub-files.

Documents (1 file)  14 KB
  http://my.opera.com/community/  14 KB
Images (26 files)  298 KB
  http://my.opera.com/community/graphics/home/intro5.jpg  77 KB
  http://files.myopera.com/EspenAO/albums/640846/motw.png  38 KB
  http://files.myopera.com/-lobo-/albums/257266/thumbs/lobo11.jpg_thumb.jpg  25 KB
  http://files.myopera.com/danquynh/albums/155486/thumbs/DSCF3120.jpg_thumb.jpg  19 KB
  http://files.myopera.com/fred/opera/promo-1g.png  17 KB
  http://files.myopera.com/EspenAO/albums/640846/img-OperaChristmasBuild-240x160.jpg  16 KB
  http://my.opera.com/community/graphics/mobile/home5.jpg  15 KB
  http://files.myopera.com/EspenAO/albums/640846/img-Christmas2008-240x160.jpg  14 KB
  http://files.myopera.com/KristianP/albums/658209/thumbs/Evangeline_Lilly_WS_1920x1200_04.jpg_thumb.jpg  12 KB
  http://files.myopera.com/masixzan2/albums/346491/thumbs/494994739l.jpg_thumb.jpg  9 KB
  http://my.opera.com/community/graphics/home/intro5.gif  9 KB
  http://files.myopera.com/lasuede/albums/287071/thumbs/swimsuit.jpg_thumb.jpg  8 KB
  http://files.myopera.com/ujval/albums/165596/thumbs/84bb7hollywoodsbestnetlohan430.jpg_thumb.jpg  7 KB
  http://my.opera.com/community/graphics/main/icons1.gif  5 KB
  http://my.opera.com/community/favicon.ico  4 KB
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Even tells you compressed/uncompressed sizes.

Huh, that's funny - given what total jackasses Google are to Opera, I'm suprised they use urchin's bastard child here. (Tracking software - gah. **** that your server logs should already be tracking) - oh yeah, and could we get my.opera to stop mangling tabs while at it?

Originally posted by deathshadow:

In other words god forbid anyone say something negative or make suggestions.

Never said anything about that. I said that this is the wrong forum to post feature requests. You are supposed to use the wish-list forum for that.

Because we sure as shine don't see anything resembling marketing!!!

You should pay attention then.

LANDS SAKE the not for profit Mozilla group runs Firefox TV SPOTS! Opera is supposed to be a commercial venture - whiskey tango foxtrot, over?

Mozilla Corporation is a commercial venture. And Mozilla has always been in the pockets of commercial interests. Pretending that Mozilla is some feelgood "we don't care about money" fluff is extremely naive. And guess what, since Mozilla gets lots of free cash from all over the place, they are flowing over with money and can spend lots of it without problems. Opera, on the other hand, needs to think about the bottom line.

hire a real international marketing firm, and do a proper push.

Oh yeah? ANd what would a "proper push" be like?

If a non-profit can pull it off, a for profit has NO EXCUSE.

Again, you are incredibly naive. There is nothing "non-profit" about Mozilla's behavior. They are backed by several huge corporations and have nearly unlimited funds.

Which is why they are tinkertoys and goofy rubbish. What we need are extensions.

You are not SUPPOSED to compare extensions and widgets, FFS. Get a clue. How many times do I have to repeat it? Widgets and extenskions are IRRELEVANT TO EACH OTHER. Get it?

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

Widgets aren't SUPPOSED to be like extensions....

But it's all we have. THAT'S THE PROBLEM AND THE POINT I WAS MAKING.

Again, get a clue. You don't HAVE widgets if you want extensions. Widgets are nothing like extensions, and are not supposed to be like extensions. And just because YOU don't approve of widgets, you are not in a position to make claims about them.

Oh yes, it's always a waste of time pointing out what's wrong. We should all just get together in a giant dirty hippy hug-fest drum circle to sing kumbaya. It's all good, no need to worry about anything or complain about things you see as wrong.

No, Mr. Straw Man. It's waste of time to post offtopic comments in a forum clearly non intended for the kind of comments you are making.

My decade of working in marketing and development and three decades of programming says different.

Except your comments here speak for themselves. Case in point:

Looks are flash in the pan quick draws that just as quickly dissapoint if that's all you bring to the table.

Yeah, because a company can only ever do one thing at a time. It's not like the fact that looks are important doesn't mean that other things aren't important as well, eh? Oh wait! You DO think a company can only do one thing at a time apparently!

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

Secondly, the skin is irrelevant to the actual rendering engine. Do you really think the guy who designs the skin is the same guy who works on implementing CSS???

No, some art... type in the back room playing with photoshop is not who I'm referring to - I'm talking about the PROGRAMMER needed to IMPLEMENT the pretty pictures, said programmers skills likely being mature enough to be better used doing something meaningful instead.

So basically, you think Opera has only one guy who does everything from CSS implementation work to user interface???

You are clearly very lacking in knowledge about how these things work. As Opera people have pointed out numerous times, the people who work on the user interface don't work on the rendering engine! They have different people and teams for different things! So your comments are simply nonsensical.

Made worse by the fact said reskinning is not going to change the layout or introduce new functionality, 99.99% chance of being yet again just another slap new graphics in place of the old ones which there's nothing wrong with...

Oh, look at you! You are happy with things so they can't ever be improved! Better stop polishing things, then. No need to make things even better, right?

Originally posted by dude09:

in 2008 I have only seen 2 publicity & 0 advertisement about Opera throughout the whole year

You haven't been paying attention then.

Honestly, even a 3 months old browser Google Chrome got more publicities & advertisements than Opera within the last 3 months!

Wow, how shocking! The world's biggest advertising company gets advertising for a new product everywhere? Amazing indeed. Who would have thought!

Geez dude, get a grip. Google is a huge company. Obviously it's going to get a lot of attention when it beats on the big drums. Google is a media darling, and they have a huge number of services, including sites like YouTube, to push Chrome through, all for free. Opera doesn't have all of these sites and services and a huge chunk of the online advertising market.

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

You haven't been paying attention then.

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

You should pay attention then.

Any PR campaign or advertisement that failed to gather it's target audience attention is a FAILURE!
It's not my respossibility (as a consumer) to paying attention to every single advertisement around me.
In the real world, it's the job of the advertisers to make sure their advertisements will attract it's targer audience attention.

Honestly, please take a few business classes to educate yourself about PR (Public Relations) & the nature of "advertisement" before yapping around like you know what you're talking about.

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

Opera doesn't have all of these sites and services and a huge chunk of the online advertising market.

Did I mentioned anything about ONLINE ADVERTISEMENT? No, I'm talking about:

Originally posted by dude09:

Before GoJoeGo trashed this thread with even more trolling comments, I would like to state that in 2008 I have only seen 2 publicity & 0 advertisement about Opera throughout the whole year (excluded the Internet).

Originally posted by hallvors:

it's incredibly difficult to balance everyone's needs

I disagree. I believe it is impossible. Opera has not, is not, and will not make a single browser that the whole world loves. The same statement applies to safari, firefox, chrome, etc. Viva la extensions! Let users make their own experience.

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

You should pay attention then.

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

You haven't been paying attention then.

Please provide screenshots, links, or something to give some validaty to your claims. From my perspective, Opera's advertising has been few and far between.

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

Opera doesn't have all of these sites and services and a huge chunk of the online advertising market.

How many television, radio, web, and magazine ads have you seen for Opera on a site that doesn't end with *.opera.com? If i think hard and give Opera the benefit of the doubt, I'd say in the last 8 years I may have seen 10. That is a high estimate.

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

You are not SUPPOSED to compare extensions and widgets, FFS. Get a clue. How many times do I have to repeat it?

Do you think there is some other opera functionality that is comparable to ff extensions? Widgets are the only thing in opera with elevated security levels. What other opera functionality would you suggest we compare extensions?

Originally posted by GoJoeGo:

So basically, you think Opera has only one guy who does everything from CSS implementation work to user interface?

No, but I believe that may be the case with the error console, source viewer, and all other developer tools not named dragonfly.

I think the single best thing Opera could do to make opera more popular is to make all/more sites work in opera. That is the biggest and most overt problem Opera is having and has been having. One way would be to have the best developer tools. Best developer tools leads to web devs using opera to make sites leads to less site incompatibility over time.

Originally posted by fearphage:

Please provide screenshots, links, or something to give some validaty to your claims.

LOL, do you really think I write down the details for all ads I see?

How many television, radio, web, and magazine ads have you seen for Opera on a site that doesn't end with *.opera.com?

Lots.

Do you think there is some other opera functionality that is comparable to ff extensions? Widgets are the only thing in opera with elevated security levels. What other opera functionality would you suggest we compare extensions?

Uh, so if there is nothing else to compare to extensions, you pick some random thing that wasn't even supposed to be anything like extensions in the first place?

Originally posted by dude09:

Any PR campaign or advertisement that failed to gather it's target audience attention is a FAILURE!

What do you know about Opera's "target audience" exactly?

Honestly, please take a few business classes to educate yourself about PR (Public Relations) & the nature of "advertisement" before yapping around like you know what you're talking about.

Apparently I know more about this than you, even though you pretend to know stuff by talking about things like "target audience"

Did I mentioned anything about ONLINE ADVERTISEMENT?

That's where browser ads mostly are these days. Google has Chrome ads all over the place because Google ads are all over the place.

I would like to request everyone to stay on topic and provide your constructive ideas. This thread is not for fighting each other but to come up with your ideas.

Please, please do not divert this thread.

The single most important thing Opera can do to make it popular is to continue making it the best browser available. Focus on features, keep improving it, get rid of the bugs, make it faster, better, safer. FEATURE RICH, Opera does this and the entire web will flock to download it. It's that simple. I would also add to this, make updates more frequently like every few months with a new feature, people love updates because it means something got fixed or improved.

There are numerous ways to increase opera's market share. Many people have already pointed them out e.g adding new features, better advertising, changing the user interface .... However, to be more constructive, i think we also need to evaluate each proposition carefully based on expected increase in market share, with the time it takes to achieve the result, or some other relevant criteria e.g past results. After, skimming through the previous posts, it's evident that no single person has the knowledge at hand to complete such a task. This is best handled by opera's managers. Although it does not mean, we can try and just ignore what i just wrote.

From personal experience, i'm in the view that people want to stick with what they have or just don't know about operas features. I introduced one of my friends to mouse gestures, which i thought at the time was only available to opera. He loved it so much, i thought for sure he would jump ship, but he didn't because he found an equivalent plug-in. My point is, first get people to fall in love with opera before any others, and second spread the word about operas useful functionalities and speed. Both can be achieved by setting up a non opera funded proactive group that promotes opera, with the task of making sure opera is installed by default, using the/their social networks to convince outside friends to use opera and cascading that role downwards and providing support to users.

I don't know, it's probably over doing it. Also i'd like to share a quote i took from somebody - "smart people use opera".

Originally posted by peterchenadded:

I don't know, it's probably over doing it. Also i'd like to share a quote i took from somebody - "smart people use opera".

If you see the link I posted in first post, there is a survey on a small group of people. This states issues like that. Also there was a old thread entirely on why people not use opera. This did not lead to conclusion. We need active steps now before it is too late.

Originally posted by peterchenadded:

"smart people use opera".

Good quote, but BAD marketing slogan. Violates a simple rule of marketing.

Never say anything that the converse could be taken as offensive. By saying "smart people use opera" you could also be said to be saying "only idiots use anything else" - this can have a negative backlash or be used by your competitors to make it sound elitist.

It also has the problem that Joe Sixpack is usually intimidated by 'the smart guy'. Nerd, Dork, Dweeb, linux user - these terms exist for a reason. Using intelligence as a scale can a> make it sound like it's difficult to use, and b> make it sound like something that would only appeal to the 30 year old virgins playing D&D and M:TG in the back room at the comic book shop.

While certainly a target audience, it's not exactly mass appeal.

Originally posted by deathshadow:

M:TG in the back room at the comic book shop

I'm only 26.

Smart is very subjective. When I think smart people, i think advanced users, techies, nerds, geeks. Based on the development process of the desktop browser, I don't feel that this is opera's target market.

There is one other thing that could be done to enhance the appeal of Opera, and that is make the Opera Community site a bit more welcoming and attractive to those who say "What is this Opera?" and come here to find out more.

I have used Opera as my primary browser since about 2002 and promoted it to other people, but I rarely come to this site because it really does present as over-earnest and taking itself [and Opera] very seriously, leaving no room for light interplay/relationship between the participants. It doesn't really encourage taking part in the community - it seems to say "Only earnest Opera Nerds are welcome!"

In contrast I regularly visit an IT community site, a medical/biological science site, and an Australian Rules Football site, and in these this rarely happens - in fact the medical site tends to let the threads drift where they may, and it makes for a real sense of community through shared humour and asides. Most of the participants there are, incidentally, Firefox users.

Originally posted by deathshadow:

"smart people use opera".

Good quote, but BAD marketing slogan. Violates a simple rule of marketing.

How about these slogan?

"Use Opera, because you're smarter."
(inspired by L'oreal Cosmetics: Because you're worth it)

"Save the Internet, use Opera", instead of "Buy Opera today... And make this banner go away"

"Opera making you smarter", instead of "Opera making you faster"...

Hey, i just wanted to share the quote - "smart people use opera", using it as a marketing slogan did not even come to mind until it was bought up. I just thought it was a nice quote and did not mean to offend. I however, agree that it is bad for P.R because as pointed out ,the reverse could be used to undermine opera, which is something else that i did not think of. I guess i'm pretty naive.

Anyway, about the current slogan "making you faster", i guess the same thing could be said about it. I think it will hurt opera's share because in some cases it may actually be slower. Even if it is a bandwidth problem i think the blame will still be attributed to the software. I read it as faster than all other browsers and faster at doing everything, not just browsing, and would turn me away with the slightest mistake. I'm just trying to suggest the same magnitude of decrease in speed, than increase in speed, hurts opera more than it hurts its competitors.

About, making this place more welcoming, i would support that too. I can't really think of anything else other then competitions and shorter messages (sorry).

Oh, out of the three "Opera making you smarter" > "Use opera because you're smarter" > "Save the Internet, use Opera". Second one is too similar to L' oreal and third one is ludicrous. It's made me smarter, because it introduced me to mouse gestures. Good job coming up with all of them.

"Buy Opera today... And make this banner go away" is actually a slogan Opera used during the paidware/shareware/adware period.

IMHO, it's better to use "Save the Internet, use Opera" to encourage users to buy the software to support Opera, instead of sounds like someone blackmail you to buy the software or he will "slap" you with a banner every time you use the browser...

What's funny about the 'buy today' is that I still encounter people who think the free version has advertising banners over three years after they got rid of them. That was a very negative impression people got about the browser from that, and it's something that still seems hard for some people to shrug off or even believe hasn't been so for years.

Just wanted to remind that choosing a slogan is not the topic of this thread. Slogan may be a part of the marketing aspect but secondary(next stage). First we(actually opera not us) need to figure out how to do marketing and to what extent where etc. Then what will be in that marketing is next topic.

So I would appreciate if everyone stick to the topic and provide more ideas in all fronts instead of carrying discussion on one apect.
We don't this thread to be jst another discusion but full of positive fresh ideas.

Thanks.

I may be in a minority here...but here it goes:

I would suggest that Opera specifically targets users in Asian countries, particularly in China and India. Why? Simply because the numbers are huge!

The way to do this is to target the government institutions - again in China and India. Here there may be significant traction to be gained. Also, the numbers are huge and one can also take advantage of the trickle-down effect. Dad/ Mom use Opera in the government jobs...kids will soon cotton onto the fact and this latter move makes takes Opera into the wider market. This is not all up in the air. Think about it! Opera is one of the most secure browsers around. This will be the key. Once government institutions start using Opera widely, those who cater to the government will also change - this will include corporates, banking institutions etc etc...

To make the deal sweeter, maybe Opera should offer to customize the websites of these government institutions to work with Opera and to have that all important line which appears at the bottom of the website: "This site works best with Opera X.XX". (Note: This is a variation of a similar suggestion made above by one of the posters) One of the advantages of this of course is that since the number of government related websites are relatively few, Opera would not be over-extending itself. And, knowing how the governments in China and India work, if Opera offers this 'service' for free, they may be all too willing to consider such a proposition in a favourable light. (My caveat is of course that I could be seriously underestimating this...but I still think it is something to seriously think about!) In fact, this strategy could be test driven in smaller countries such as the UK and some of the Scandinavian countries.

Yes, of course as some of the posts mentioned above suggest, site compatibility is a problem. But what I am suggesting is that Opera needs to break out of its Euro-mindset (apologies to all who may be offended by this comment). The primary market drivers in terms of number of users lie in the Asian countries. If you crack that market, you have your numbers.

Originally posted by kristalsoldier:

I would suggest that Opera specifically targets users in Asian countries, particularly in China and India.

http://www.operachina.com/

Originally posted by dude09:

Originally posted by kristalsoldier:

I would suggest that Opera specifically targets users in Asian countries, particularly in China and India.

http://www.operachina.com/

Hmmm...I think you are misunderstanding me. For that matter, I believe Opera also has operations in India. But that is not exactly what I am talking about. What I am suggesting is a proactive engagement with the largest entities in those two countries - their individual governmental institutions. Merely having an operational presence is not the name of the game - or at least so I think.

Cheers!

make the user interface more intuitive, opera can do so much right now, but most people (even longtime users) don't know it actually could do with it.

have several special pre-configured downloads (or at least shortcut-templates), like one for MSIE-users, FF-users, older people, families with children, windows-user, mac-user, linux-user, etc.

how about a setup-guide, that will ask the user for special preferences, describing what he will end up with with each option?

but i guess, in the end it will be decided at the point of how many websites will show properly, especially when it comes to major players like google.

I have not read everything, but I will say what I think:

- Opera needs more marketing. Ok, Opera can't compete with Google in marketing, but Opera can do more than it does now.
- User interface more friendly. Recently I read that Opera had recruit someone to create a new interface. I hope that the new interface comes with Opera 10.
- Opera has become a monster in the advanced options -and for advanced users- . Let me explain: For a new user, Opera can be more ugly or pretty (interface), and Opera will work fast and well, but... Why this new users begin using Opera, and not another? We all know that the best things about Opera are in their advanced options and these options are not discovered in one day. I know it is a difficult issue, and I do not know if it's better a simple interface for the vast majority and leave the advanced options as they are now, or do more accessible the advanced options. Maybe with a tips, like Yahoo Mail or Gmail, for example.

What good is marketing when popular site #12 doesn't work in opera?

Originally posted by fearphage:

What good is marketing when popular site #12 doesn't work in opera?

Boost Opera popularity to gain enough market share to get popular site #12 to make sure it's working properly in Opera?
Yes, that's a lousy plan...

But honestly, that's how Firefox did it...

Originally posted by dude09:

Originally posted by fearphage:

What good is marketing when popular site #12 doesn't work in opera?

Boost Opera popularity to gain enough market share to get popular site #12 to make sure it's working properly in Opera?
Yes, that's a lousy plan...

But honestly, that's how Firefox did it...

I agree.
Most importantly, passing the name "opera" around will help in that respect. I have said repeatedly about the familiarity of the name firefox( even among people who does not use it, use IE) . I was watching a CNN new segment talking about browser war just few days ago and the name firefox was everywhere. Opera never mentioned although as expected safari was there along with big name apple.
No one is saying it will be fixed in one day but thats the way to approach it. If we think the whole world will start learning W3 standard and making sites viewable with any browser automatically, then we might be waiting another 10 years.

Originally posted by dude09:

Yes, that's a lousy plan

Agreed. Getting a lot of people to test and see that a few of the sites they use don't work in Opera is not goig to benefit anyone.

Originally posted by dude09:

But honestly, that's how Firefox did it...

I'm not so sure about that. Firefox piggybacked on the same code people were using for netscape support. I think firefox's grade A development tools (read: firebug) drew web developers to firefox and thus they tested in it because they were developing the site in it.

Originally posted by fearphage:

Getting a lot of people to test and see that a few of the sites they use don't work in Opera is not goig to benefit anyone.

Yep, that's a vicious circle that hard to break: First your browser need to be popular enough in order to get the attention from those popular website developers, but then you need 'em to cooperate with you first in order to be popular...

Originally posted by fearphage:

Firefox piggybacked on the same code people were using for netscape support. I think firefox's grade A development tools (read: firebug) drew web developers to firefox and thus they tested in it because they were developing the site in it.

Yes, that's also one of the reason. But do you think a lot of website developers would care about testing Firefox with their website, if FF only got 1% of market share just like Opera does?

How about those "overrated" PR Mozilla been getting since the demise of Netscape? That help to boost FF market share, & encorage some web developers to support Firefox too... But the poor Opera is getting none of that, so Opera need to work a lot harder in establishing effective PR campaigns to polish it's brand-name. IMHO Opera can easily took a big chunk of market share from IE if Opera willing to spend more effort (& $$$) to promote it's browser to the public to gain awareness. Once Opera reach a high % of market share, website compatibility won't be a major problem...

Originally posted by dude09:

First your browser need to be popular enough in order to get the attention from those popular website developers

I don't believe that is the only way into the door.

Originally posted by dude09:

do you think a lot of website developers would care about testing Firefox with their website, if FF only got 1% of market share just like Opera does?

If opera had dev tools that were better than firebug, i think we'd both find out.

Originally posted by fearphage:

If opera had dev tools that were better than firebug, i think we'd both find out.

Amen. Working on that

Originally posted by hallvors:

Amen. Working on that

Any hint about future features?

All I hope to see is the same 'State of the Art' superior web browser that, regardless of how the coders code the websites, it will read it nonetheless. The browser that looks great, can be customized up the wahzoo, and is easy enough so that a novice can have tons of fun playing with its features.

Oh, the only thing else I would want is to be able to have FireFox type extensions............which is why I use FireFox & not Opera.

THE ONLY REASON!

If it did the above, I would personally make 5 copies of Opera, & give it to 5 people, making sure they did the same. If it did all the above I guarantee no one would be able to leave it alone. it would take the world by storm on merits alone!