Thanks for sharing.

I want a weekly

Edit : I'm in the 1% of left-hander

Yep, Left handers often use a right-handed mouse set-up. It means that the rest of the family/majority of colleagues make fewer comments about being cack-handed/sinister etc when they use our computers.

Also, left-handers, being more adaptable than right, have no problem adjusting to right-hand mouse clicks in their left hand.

It's just one of the many ways we adjust to a right-handed world.

Very interesting findings.

@A lot of people hardly use bookmarks at all (30 bookmarks and less). A lot of people use bookmarks a lot (300 bookmarks or more).

I think more and more people use online storage of their bookmarks. I have my hompage as my del.icio.us bookmark page. Which makes them just as accesable as the opera functionality. Most of the time, it just sits there as the first open tab for easy access.

This is a hint hint. We want bookmark/profile sync


- ØØ -

Haha, I was just posting a comment in the last news asking if there was an update today. Wow, it came quite fast:P

- widgets? I use the widgets on my Mac (dashboard). Missing the speed of the Opera browser in the mac version.
- my resolution is big enough so I don't use fit to width
- "Open windows instead of tabs" - never used :>
- I'm right handed^^
- I don't even have a home page. Speed Dial!
- Buhu, not the statusbar :(((
- Not using master password :>
- Confirming is a Windows(Vista) thing xD
- I got thousands of bookmakrs
- Got 29 folders :>

1) I think enabling the status bar by default is a good idea.

2) If you take away my "confirm exit" option, bad things will happen! Seriously, though - maybe a lot of people don't use it simply because it's off by default and perhaps don't notice that option?

3) I love stats like this. Keep it up!

"A preference we added by popular request, the ability to turn on Fit to Width by default is used by 0.0%"

What is that by the way?

Also, weekly, please? :-}

Ok, good to know

But weekly weekly please !!

I have installed a couple widgets, looked at them a couple times... I have yet to find a real use for them.

I have changed my homepage from the default, but I never use it.

When counting bookmark folders do you count the 3 folders on the root and the 40 sub-folders and the 11 sub-sub-folders and so-forth? those folders go as many as 6 layers deep.

I have enabled my usage statistics now also, hope after 2-3 months you will provide this information again :-)

"A preference we added by popular request, the ability to turn on Fit to Width by default is used by 0.0%"

I had it switched on for quite a while as there is no other easy way to read some mail if you show the message next to the list and not below but the message is too wide.

However, fit to width does not work quite well, resulting in 100% processor load sometimes and uneccesary changes to the layout even if the page does't even reach the maximum width(particularly bad example: http://www.computerwoche.de/nachrichten/newsletter/ notice the right-hand-side menu). Some mouse-over navigation was not usable anymore(GMX).

Useful changes would be to be able to change the setting for mail only or to disable it per page if it doesn't work well there. I really miss it in site preferences, same as zoom...

Well, you may also consider the fact that newbies (people who use Opera the most) may not come here and hence their preferences were not included in your stats.

@Doliprane: "In 9.2 we started asking one in 100 users if they want to participate." That includes *all* users of the final release.

Thanx for interesting info!

My five cents:
- widgets are more like a toy still, not realy an application.
- "Fit to Width" is very unperdictable.
- big lol for "Open windows instead of tabs"
- yes for status bar "on" by default again.
- looks like, i am that 1.8% who confirms exit.

Don't forget we have independent statistics too

"A preference we added by popular request, the ability to turn on Fit to Width by default is used by 0.0%"
LOL ,so funny

- A preference we added by popular request, the ability to turn on Fit to Width by default is used by 0.0%

lol I somehow missed that . If someone tells me how to actiavte it I'll be using it

- The status bar is quite popular, so we consider turning it on by default again.

yep, I even put "quick launch" bookmarks in there in "images only" mode. And I really hate when webdevs forget to put favicons on their sites... Luckuly in Opera I can set my own favicons.

- Only 1.8% ask Opera to confirm exit. Since most people only use a single window, this setting is very close to the warning in Firefox that you are about to close a window with more than one tab. The low number might indicate that asking by default (like we used to do and like Firefox still does) is annoying more people than it helps.

Opera by deafaul opens your last session, so this warning is is really not needed. You can just fire it up again and all your tabs are still there...

"A preference we added by popular request, the ability to turn on Fit to Width by default is used by 0.0%"

Well, I use it when ever I need, and then I love it!! :)

Oh, I forgot to tell that I don't like how Opera cache pages.

I visited dekstop team blog second time and it shows old content (0 comments), etc...

Same happens in forums, when I have to refresh pages all over and all over again to see new content.

Very annoying thingie.

thanks for taking care of what users want, big brother

Quite a few people have installed widgets, but virtually noone arrange them in folders.

I have around 100 widgets installed with 3 of them always open (Opera clock, TouchtheSky, Time and Date). I use search to find and run other widgets, I don't need folders there yet.
But I badly need folders for news feeds...

Only 1.8% ask Opera to confirm exit.

I don't need and use confirmation for closing window, but I badly miss undo for closed window.

:-D
I`m in 0.0% who uses Fit to Width option

I don't use fit-to-width by default, because opera freezes on phpbb sites with it.

Quote: A preference we added by popular request, the ability to turn on Fit to Width by default is used by 0.0%


I use this, but only in specific circumstances because leaving it on screws up a couple of pages. There are some websites that sometimes refuse to work correctly, so I just turn it on temporarily to read that web site and then turn it off.

It is a very useful feature, but used only when necessary.



oh, and for the homepage, I use both home page (google.com/ig) & speed dial. They work hand in hand and each have a use.

I didn't know about several of these features. The interval master password feature sounds neat.

I`m
- in 0.0% who uses Fit to Width option, where is it?
- in 1.8% who ask Opera to confirm exit.
- don't use the status bar.
- only use tabs
- using speed dial; no homepage!
- Not using master password
- manny unsorted bookmarks in folders

- one of "We want bookmark/profile sync"
- and one of asked in 100 users



M.

Originally posted by Alpha-Toxic:

Opera by deafaul opens your last session, so this warning is is really not needed. You can just fire it up again and all your tabs are still there...

Unless restarting opera means 30 seconds of heavy CPU/disk/network usage, then it's a pain...

I'm left handed

I thought this was a kestrel release when I saw it was new

Widgets would be a lot more useful if they could be automatically updated, as with Firefox extensions.

What about torrents and feeds?

I think no one uses torrents and the feed management is very slow when Opera starts. That's why I use Google Reader

And the widgets. "Quite a few people have installed widgets.". I can imagine, I dislike the most of them. Two or three is ok, but it is very, very few.
I think you should not to press on the widgets to the users but you should open some API to write useful plugins. Ok, ok, I know. Millions of the time was it told.

Widgets would be a lot more useful if they did something besides tell time and check the weather. Opera widgets tend to be more useful than widgets for other platforms, but I still have a hard time finding any that I actually care for.

a am also laft hander

very interresting informations
thanks!

the ability to turn on Fit to Width by default .

Where is that feature?

I'm left-handed but I use the mouse as a normal right-handed. It's Natural I think.

thanks for this info, but I want a weekly

I've got "Fit to Width by default" option turned on on my second computer because of a low resolution - 800x600 (15' monitor) so I find this option very useful.

I hope you're not going to remove unpopular features from the next release?

Hello!

>The option to "Open windows instead of tabs" (SDI if you like) is
>the *least* popular of all the tab options, which tells something
>about the popularity of tabs...

Or that most people only use a single tab ...

>Only 1.8% ask Opera to confirm exit. Since most people only use a
>single window, this setting is very close to the warning in
>Firefox that you are about to close a window with more than one
>tab. The low number might indicate that asking by default (like we
>used to do and like Firefox still does) is annoying more people
>than it helps.

BTW, I would like to know how many open tabs users have on average.
For example, currently I use Maxthon 1.6 and at the moment I have
72 tabs in a single window ...

Cheers, Roman

"we started asking one in 100 users"
how many said yes? What's the significance in your numbers? (I guess that if every tenth said yes you still have plenty of reports EDIT: and you are significant to better than .1%).

Did you learn anything about email, chat, newsfeeds et cetera?

@Dockir- I average 20-30 tabs.

Fot to width is great on monitors with pivot!

I wasn't prompted to enter the survey but I thought I'd put a few things here:

- I have one Widget, the Desktop Team one.
- I hardly use Fit to Width, as it crunches some pages up that would normally fit properly when turned off.
- I always use tabs.
- I also use the mouse as is when it's in my left hand. After all, a right mouse button is still right when it's in my left hand! (Having said that, I usually use my right hand anyway).
- My homepage is the Opera start, but I have it set to show a blank page on start so I don't see it.
- Yep, status bar is on here.
- The speed dial has replaced my need for bookmarks

Originally posted by oponek:

I hope you're not going to remove unpopular features from the next release?

I think they considering to move some unpopular options out from Preferences dialog to opera:config.
For me Fit to Width (along with zoom) will be very useful in Per Site Preferences.

Testing "Fit to Width"...CNet.com doesn't fit...jeje maybe that's the reason why 0.0% use it...it doesn't work well. Sorry Devs. 3 minutes to find the feature and 30 seconds to find that it doesn't work.

Guys don't bother devs with the weekly, they will release it when ready, not before. I feel good enoug to find a new post with cool info...like today. That's all I need by now. Maybe in a month will be a new weekly..ore more time...BUT PLEASE, not after Safari 3 Final.

not reading everyone else's answers:

Folders for widgets: I'd love to and actually tried a while back but it's simply way to cumbersome. This must be done easily to be used

Fit to width by defalt: could be useful if per site setting only. I would use it while doing testing, which I haven't done in a while.

I might change the gome address for others because they're use to it in the browsers they come from. so I would set it to whatever thy're used to have. Then I show them they don't need it as they can actually have as many as they wish: sessions. Even less useful with speed dial but I still prefer to have my own in case I accidently press CTRL + Space,

Status bar:My first, if not only configuration everytome I install Opera anew. I can't understand why it's not active by default. My 2nd config is actually to set the progress bar to popup at bottom of page: it has a lot more useful info than the address bar thing and actually shows there's activity.

Confirm exit: if I say to close the darn browser, I actually want it closed. Don't try to double guess me and prevent me from doing a mistake I didn't do. If I closed by mistake, no biggy, I can reopen and start again wherever I was, thanks to Sessions, You're doing the right thing here.

I have a lot of bookmarks but don't use them so much. What I need though, no, what I want, is book mark sync with my Opera: multiplatform, multibrowser: PC (win, Linux), cell phone...

it's a lot easier to create and manage folders for bookmarks than widgets. I suspect it's the same for contacts.

ok, that's it. Thanks for sharing the results of your spying on us :-) (I'm joking)

I just decided to try Opera 9.21 (coming from Firefox), and I like what I see so far... It looks like the real innovation is happening here. (And these are, indeed, some interesting usage statistics.)

I don't know if this is the right place, but there are a couple of MAJOR (in my opinion) UI flaws which make using Opera frustrating at times... so much so, that I may hold off on using for a while despite the fact that I find it superior in almost every other way.

1) When I click "Open in New Tab", the new tab should not become the active tab. I would have thought that this was self-evident, but the entire reason users choose to open something in a new tab is because we aren't finished viewing the content in the original page. It's a blog dominated world, and bloggers scatter referential links throughout their content... we shouldn't have to break the flow of things when opening those links by being forced to another tab that we intended to read AFTER finishing the blog posting.

The lack of an option--at least--to specify this behavior is pretty obnoxious. Or is there an option that I am missing?

2) This one isn't as big, but I have still found it surprisingly annoying. When I click on a link, I expect the status bar to keep me informed of the...wait for it... STATUS. :-) I know it sounds silly, but its how I'm conditioned after 10-15 year of browsing. If a page is taking a while to respond, I want to see in the taskbar "Loading blah..." or "Locating blah...". The browser feels less responsive without that information. (I do like the progress bar on the nav bar, though.)

"Quite a few people have installed widgets, but virtually noone arrange them in folders.

I do use folders for widgets a lot, although I don't use widgets very much. But if I need a widget, I want to find it quick!

I think folders should be replaced by categories, which could directly be imported from the widgets homepage

A preference we added by popular request, the ability to turn on Fit to Width by default is used by 0.0%

That's because FTW fails often and renders some pages unusable. FTW would be much more useful in SSP!

The status bar is quite popular, so we consider turning it on by default again.

I think this is because using the status bar is the only way to get rid of those annoying giant tool tips including the link-address.
An option to toggle link address in tool tips (Opera 5 or 6 had this option) would be useful.

Only 1.8% ask Opera to confirm exit. Since most people only use a single window, this setting is very close to the warning in Firefox that you are about to close a window with more than one tab. The low number might indicate that asking by default (like we used to do and like Firefox still does) is annoying more people than it helps.

I think this option is turned off by all users who "Continue from last time". This option is quite useless then because you could simple restart to get back where you've when closing Opera (accidentally).
An warning option for every window with more than one page would be much more useful, especially for those people who use "Continue from last time"

You can't draw conclusions out of this option (Confirm exit) without checking for the other setting (Continue from last time)!

Final comment:
It was really a brilliant idea to examine the users settings, but beware of drawing the wrong conclusions out of the collected data. They have to be analyzed very carefully!
If someone does not use an option or feature, this could mean two things. He doesn't need it or it may be simply not helpful in the current development state or just buggy ... (this could be the case more often than you think)

"A preference we added by popular request, the ability to turn on Fit to Width by default is used by 0.0%"

I tried this for a while, but it breaks too many pages to use as the default.

"The home page is more popular than we maybe thought, 51% actually change the home page address."

How many of those change it to about:blank?

"A lot of people hardly use bookmarks at all (30 bookmarks and less)."

I only use about that number regularly (within a given month), but I've got plenty of others just for reference.

@cavalez

"status-bar is a very importatnt thing, I see address where will me take the next click."

That's what the tool-tip is for.

smitty:

1) click links with the middle mouse button to open in a background tab (like in firefox), or press ctrl+shift while clicking. The "new tab" button assumes you want to open a completely new site, so it makes sense that it pops up in the front.

2) shift+F12 - buttons - status - drag and drop whatever you need whereever you need it. Also, you can then turn off (or play with the settings) in shift+F12 - toolbars - progress bar.

The first conclusion was a bit surprising: Weekly users are in general less active users than the average user. What? Well, we suspect that many weekly users simply have both a weekly and a final installed, so they don't use as many features or change as many preferences

How strange... Other than one build, which was fixed quickly, I have had no problems and always run ONLY the latest build.

The status bar is quite popular, so we consider turning it on by default again.

Well it is about f***ing time. While it dosn't matter so much with a reliable faster connection, when you have dial-up or a fluctuating connection you need the added info

JavaScript and Plugins are both used by more than 99% by default

Well duh, why would you NOT run them.

Only 1.8% ask Opera to confirm exit. Since most people only use a single window, this setting is very close to the warning in Firefox that you are about to close a window with more than one tab. The low number might indicate that asking by default (like we used to do and like Firefox still does) is annoying more people than it helps.

A lot of people hardly use bookmarks at all (30 bookmarks and less). A lot of people use bookmarks a lot (300 bookmarks or more).

You mean I am not a alone My brothers think it wierd that I use the save your sesion feature, but I can't think of a better way to save a website that you only want saved in the short term.