I’m amazed that Opera has had such little market share for so long but maybe with the release of Opera 9.5 things are about to change.
Microsoft have been dominant in the browser industry since the browser wars between themselves and Netscape in the 90’s and it’s only been the recent emergence of Mozilla Firefox that has seemingly put Internet Explorer under any kind of threat.
However, over the years Opera has developed into a reliable and innovative browser which has set the bench mark for many ideas that both Firefox and Internet Explorer have then gone onto implement. Opera has also been at the forefront (along with Safari) at introducing future CSS3 selectors and modules into their browser which have so far gone largely untouched by the major vendors.
The main problem that Opera has had is that it’s always been less glamarous. Yes, it’s always been streets ahead of the competition in terms of code rendering accuracy based on the HTML and CSS spec but for the vast majority of internet users, this has been highly irrelevant and it isn’t until now that Opera appears to be preparing to step out of the shadows.
One of the biggest problems that I’ve encountered in the past is the ability to find within the history section, a page that I’ve at some point visited in the past. However, Opera has introduced a new feature that allows the user to search the contents of any page that they’ve previously visited by simply typing in keywords in the address bar which will personally save me heaps of time scrolling through my history, trying to remember what the title of a page was called.
With other features like the ability to sync the browser across different platforms, including mobile devices using Opera Link; Opera claiming that 9.5 is twice as fast as 9.2 and the highly anticipated release of the Opera Dragonfly developer tools last month, Opera 9.5 will hopefully be making up a little ground on Firefox and Internet Explorer over the coming months.
Opera are a commercial business who couldn’t afford to go free when Netscape & IE disputed the browser wars. Then, when Firefox came along they had a model which could support them so they went free too; however, Firefox had the extensibility which Opera didn’t.
Now Opera has everything everyone else has, but it’s been the underdog for so many years that it’ll take something really special to give it a huge boost in market share. A shame, because it’s a really nice browser.
I completely agree Peter and it’s mainly been the web developer toolbar along with Firebug that’s kept Firefox as my default browser for so long. I do like Opera though and if Dragonfly does a similar job then I may be tempted to switch.
Firebug and web developer toolbar are probably the main reasons i stick with firefox.