Opera Q2: Sales Up 32% To $52.1M; Mobile Surges, Desktop Flat

http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/22/opera-q2-mobile-browse/

by Brajeshwar • 14 years ago

36 13 14 years ago

StavrosK• 14 years ago

Even though I switched to Chrome, I hope Opera does well. It still has my heart, I've used it for seven years or so.

manojlds2• 14 years ago

I am really surprised and many time pissed off ( as a Opera user) that Opera desktop doesn't have as much user share as it should. I don't know what it missed. Many of the new features in browsers these days would trace back to Opera. Many features in Opera are not found in other browsers. But still, it remains flat. Sad.

MatthewPhillips3• 14 years ago

I use and am a fan of Opera as well, but the features you talk about are UI features. Those are nice, but what matters is standards compatibility and that is where Opera lags behind.

Just to name a few missing things: flexbox (supported by most browsers for years now), no requestAnimationFrame, no IndexedDB, no css calc(), No blob urls, no 3d transforms.

CoryMathews2• 14 years ago

As a developer we still cannot use them until we can drop support for IE8. So it really does not matter at all if other browsers support them or not.

manojlds2• 14 years ago

You maybe right, but I was talking more about user adoption. It had it in it to be a popular browser for users (IMO, of course) and user adoption would have made the devs not really care about the things that are missing.

Shorel• 14 years ago

Both sets of features are important.

Lagged2Death• 14 years ago

I've used Opera as my primary browser and email client for years. I recommend Firefox to all my family and friends. I too often run into web sites that simply don't work right in Opera, and I don't think anyone else wants to put up with the hassle. (Heck, the site linked from the "CSS Font Stack" item on the front page of Hacker News right now doesn't work in Opera.)

One site, which I use to pay some medical bills, fails with Opera in such a way that the site appears to be down for maintenance. But opening it up in Firefox works fine. That issue had me confused for a while, and I like to think I'm savvier than the average bear, at least.

I understand the appeal of the vision of a truly standards-based web, but I'm beginning to suspect it's just not workable. The various APIs are just too complicated. Perfect compatibility would mean getting even the bugs working the same way. The organizations that create and maintain websites will always have to triage their testing resources, and the smallest browsers will always be left out of the testing, and the smallest browsers will consequently demonstrate problems that will in turn keep their market share small.

It's a situation that makes the success of Firefox and Chrome all the more astonishing, really.

rimantas• 14 years ago

Ok, sales up. How about usage? I had Opera Mini on my Sony-Ericsson a few years ago. Used it maybe half a dozen of times.

andyking• 14 years ago

I use it all the time - 3G coverage is patchy where I live, and Opera Mini is far quicker and more reliable over a slow mobile connection than trying to load a bloated 300k+ page over a 12kbps GPRS link.

Tomis02• 14 years ago

Even though it can't compete with the marketing of Chrome and Firefox, Opera is still the best browser.

Opera Q2: Sales Up 32% To $52.1M; Mobile Surges, Desktop Flat

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