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Smart move. I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore. I personally stopped worrying about it for any of my products when it hit 1.6% market sh

Smart move. I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore. I personally stopped worrying about it for any of my products when it hit 1.6% market share, and that was five years ago. They're essentially not supported by anybody, and haven't been for a long time. ... But that's never mattered, since they have always known it. And they went out of their way to make sure they rendered exactly like the dominant browser. For the longest time, they'd match Internet Explorer quirk for quirk, so if you supported that you supported Opera. Now they see that Chrome is going to win, so they're switching to copying Chrome instead. And since Chrome has a nice drop-in "Chrome in a box" rendering engine they can use, it's going to be a lot easier to pull off this time around. They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about (aside from six people who are no doubt here in this thread somewhere), but your site will probably render fine on it. EDIT: Looks like those aforementioned Opera devotees have arrived. This comment went from 6 points and the top slot down to 1 point in the last ten minutes. Funny, since it's not actually an anti-Opera comment (or of course the sort of thing that down-votes here are usually reserved for).

ohwp 14y ago
"I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore." Hi, I'm a dev who always develop for Opera. The reason: if it works in Opera it almost is working in all other browsers. And I ofcourse like Opera very much. I think it has one of the best interfaces and toolsets. "They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about." This is a very stupid statement. 300 million monthly users care about Opera. The HN "community" != the rest of the world.
- hkolk 14y ago
  Working for one of the biggest sites in the netherlands: 0.31% is Opera's market share at our site. It's not on our supported browsers list
  - Freestyler_3 14y ago
    That's probably just me.
- emehrkay 14y ago
  History has shown me that if it breaks in Opera it will break in IE. The difference being that Opera will give you more details
- homosaur 14y ago
  I run a site that is not technical at all, it's a legal site related to divorcing fathers. Last year the site had 1,111,795 total visits and 5429 of them were from Opera. So I'm not sure who is this community that cares that much about Opera but they are not in the US.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    What is the site? Interesting.
- mbell 14y ago
  You say 300 million like it is actually a big number in this context. Its not, use a percentage. I'd also love to know where 300 million is coming from, as it seems extremely high.
meaty 14y ago
I've upvoted you because it's the same from us. We have had zero hits from opera for a couple of years.
- michael_h 14y ago
  I'm not sure that you would know. This is my user agent string: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; InfoPath.2; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E) ...running the current version of Opera. Most other people I know that use opera do the same thing to get around silly sites that won't even try to display their content.
  - sjwright 14y ago
    It's moves like that which mean Opera has dug its own grave of irrelevancy. They should have given you the tools to enable spoofing on a per-domain basis only, not browser-wide.
    - mbitca 14y ago
      They did give their users those tools. Site prefs have been a feature of Opera for a decade or so.
    - gebe 14y ago
      If it's one browser that have a shit ton of per domain/site options it is Opera. edit: Also, what is up with the throwing around of the word "irrelevancy" on HN lately. Usually in snarky contexts as well.
- prumek 14y ago
  You should probably update your stats scripts.
rplnt 14y ago
You don't have to test for it if you are in a market where it has 1.6% share. There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share. As for the second paragraph, Opera was actually strict pro-standard.. sometimes for their own bad. Third paragraph is total bullshit. If anything, Chrome is the one copying from Opera. Webkit isn't "Chrome in a box" either. And pull of what this time? As mentioned in my first paragraph, Opera has and had users, just not in your market probably. I written several times why Opera has users in certain markets, so just tl;dr: Opera was the best browser but was paid. Anything East from Germany didn't really care for paying for software (since it was insanely expensive), so they used the best browser out there. When FF was born, west switched to it (since it was better than IE). Opera went free too late, but managed to hold quite a big user-base in certain areas despite Google pouring billions into advertisement and producing chrome-only features. (another big contributor is Turbo and slow internet speeds, but I think it was a secondary factor). ad EDIT: cry me a river. While I don't feel the need to downvote you, your comment did sound pricky enough to convince someone to do so.
- bdash 14y ago
  > Webkit isn't "Chrome in a box" either. The Chromium Embedded Framework (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework) isn't too far from that. I'm not sure if Opera is using this project in particular, but they do mention using Chromium.
  - rplnt 14y ago
    It seems you are right, other comments mentioned using V8 as well.
- jahewson 14y ago
  > There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share. As there are so many would you mind listing a few?
  - jve 14y ago
    Russia. Was 20%+ last year, now 10%+ http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-RU-monthly-201201-201301 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-RU-monthly-201201-201301 Or Belarus 30%+: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-BY-monthly-201201-201301 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-BY-monthly-201201-201301
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
SkyMarshal 14y ago
>I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore. Hello. Now you know at least one. :) Of course FF, Chrome/ium, Safari, IE take priority, but I still run everything by Opera too. I just love Opera and have since I discovered MDI > tabs in the early 2000s, among other things. This change will make all that easier though, so nice to see it. PS - I didn't downvote you, though don't consider your comment particularly worthy of upvotes either.
nolok 14y ago
You are not being downvoted because of Opera devotees. You are getting downvoted because of your passive aggressive tone, similar to every single reddit comment which starts with "I know I'm going to be downvoted for this", nobody like the martyr argument. And assuming your own use case and global world stats to decide what browser to support is not a smart way to do things. Just look at the CIS market and it will tell you another story for Opera, not supporting Opera there "because it only has 1.6% worldwide" would be a dumb reasoning. What matters for your choice is the market share on your properties, not on others' properties.
- bpatrianakos 14y ago
  That's all in the interpretation. I saw nothing passive aggressive about what he said. He just stated his opinions (and what I believe to be many facts too) in a very mater-of-fact way. There's a difference between that and passive aggressive. As far as Opera goes though, you both have a point. If you really want to drill down into the data then your argument stands but generally speaking, without being oh so concerned and preoccupied with complete and totally accuracy (like we often are on HN and miss the forest for the trees because of) Opera really isn't much to worry about. It's a great browser and all but you can bet that if you're building a new web property you're not going to see a lot of Opera users with 1.6% market share worldwide. Sure, you might get lucky (or unlucky depending on how you see it) and somehow get a swarm of Opera users but I also might win the lottery this week too.
  - tarabukka 14y ago
    Not passive aggressive? >the browser that nobody cares about >Now they see Chrome is going to win Implies that Opera never innovates or has anything interesting to offer, and implies that instead they follow the market leader like-for-like. They were one of the first browsers to have tabs and supported many CSS3 properties without prefixes first. Just because they didn't support WebSuperFlySpeedySocketRockets the day the draft standard was out doesn't mean they don't innovate. >copying Chrome They're standards compliant, Chrome is standards compliant. Not "copying" Chrome.
papsosouid 14y ago
>I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore You don't know very good web devs then. By far the easiest path as a developer is to develop for opera, then test the rest. You end up with far few problems that way. If you develop for firefox or chrome it is easy to write a bunch of stuff that works in that browser, but not in the other, and then you have way more work dealing with fixing it. Opera is strict enough that if it works there, it is almost certainly going to work everywhere else (not old IEs obviously).
freshhawk 14y ago
Amazing how communities that railed against monolithic implementations and stagnation in the past are perfectly happy with it when it's "their team" that's becoming the monolith.
- Dylanlacey 14y ago
  I'm not perfectly happy, there's not not much impact being unhappy is likely to have. Once a company makes a huge announcement like this, displeasure from the customer base is unlikely to cause them to change their minds until either they discover the change was a HUGE mistake and upsets lots of their customers and they lose significant market share OR they're forced to change because they go bankrupt.
  - fpgeek 14y ago
    Being unhappy isn't likely to change Opera's decision, of course, but... the reaction to Opera's decision is likely to influence other players. For example, the difference between "bring on the monoculture" and "this is a sad day for web standards" is likely to influence Mozilla's future direction, both directly and indirectly (via the choices web developers make in supporting or not supporting Firefox).
prumek 14y ago
> they're switching to copying Chrome How so? Like Chrome copied Safari because they're both using Webkit? > They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about (aside from six people who are no doubt here in this thread somewhere), but your site will probably render fine on it. That's the problem for you Opera bashers. It will now have room to grow and get a much bigger user base on PCs.

ohwp 14y ago

"I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore." Hi, I'm a dev who always develop for Opera. The reason: if it works in Opera it almost is working in all other browsers. And I ofcourse like Opera very much. I think it has one of the best interfaces and toolsets. "They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about." This is a very stupid statement. 300 million monthly users care about Opera. The HN "community" != the rest of the world.

hkolk 14y ago
Working for one of the biggest sites in the netherlands: 0.31% is Opera's market share at our site. It's not on our supported browsers list
- Freestyler_3 14y ago
  That's probably just me.
emehrkay 14y ago
History has shown me that if it breaks in Opera it will break in IE. The difference being that Opera will give you more details
homosaur 14y ago
I run a site that is not technical at all, it's a legal site related to divorcing fathers. Last year the site had 1,111,795 total visits and 5429 of them were from Opera. So I'm not sure who is this community that cares that much about Opera but they are not in the US.
- Evbn 14y ago
  What is the site? Interesting.
mbell 14y ago
You say 300 million like it is actually a big number in this context. Its not, use a percentage. I'd also love to know where 300 million is coming from, as it seems extremely high.

meaty 14y ago

I've upvoted you because it's the same from us. We have had zero hits from opera for a couple of years.

michael_h 14y ago
I'm not sure that you would know. This is my user agent string: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; InfoPath.2; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E) ...running the current version of Opera. Most other people I know that use opera do the same thing to get around silly sites that won't even try to display their content.
- sjwright 14y ago
  It's moves like that which mean Opera has dug its own grave of irrelevancy. They should have given you the tools to enable spoofing on a per-domain basis only, not browser-wide.
  - mbitca 14y ago
    They did give their users those tools. Site prefs have been a feature of Opera for a decade or so.
  - gebe 14y ago
    If it's one browser that have a shit ton of per domain/site options it is Opera. edit: Also, what is up with the throwing around of the word "irrelevancy" on HN lately. Usually in snarky contexts as well.
prumek 14y ago
You should probably update your stats scripts.

rplnt 14y ago

You don't have to test for it if you are in a market where it has 1.6% share. There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share. As for the second paragraph, Opera was actually strict pro-standard.. sometimes for their own bad. Third paragraph is total bullshit. If anything, Chrome is the one copying from Opera. Webkit isn't "Chrome in a box" either. And pull of what this time? As mentioned in my first paragraph, Opera has and had users, just not in your market probably. I written several times why Opera has users in certain markets, so just tl;dr: Opera was the best browser but was paid. Anything East from Germany didn't really care for paying for software (since it was insanely expensive), so they used the best browser out there. When FF was born, west switched to it (since it was better than IE). Opera went free too late, but managed to hold quite a big user-base in certain areas despite Google pouring billions into advertisement and producing chrome-only features. (another big contributor is Turbo and slow internet speeds, but I think it was a secondary factor). ad EDIT: cry me a river. While I don't feel the need to downvote you, your comment did sound pricky enough to convince someone to do so.

bdash 14y ago
> Webkit isn't "Chrome in a box" either. The Chromium Embedded Framework (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework) isn't too far from that. I'm not sure if Opera is using this project in particular, but they do mention using Chromium.
- rplnt 14y ago
  It seems you are right, other comments mentioned using V8 as well.
jahewson 14y ago
> There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share. As there are so many would you mind listing a few?
- jve 14y ago
  Russia. Was 20%+ last year, now 10%+ http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-RU-monthly-201201-201301 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-RU-monthly-201201-201301 Or Belarus 30%+: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-BY-monthly-201201-201301 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-BY-monthly-201201-201301

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

SkyMarshal 14y ago

>I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore. Hello. Now you know at least one. :) Of course FF, Chrome/ium, Safari, IE take priority, but I still run everything by Opera too. I just love Opera and have since I discovered MDI > tabs in the early 2000s, among other things. This change will make all that easier though, so nice to see it. PS - I didn't downvote you, though don't consider your comment particularly worthy of upvotes either.

nolok 14y ago

You are not being downvoted because of Opera devotees. You are getting downvoted because of your passive aggressive tone, similar to every single reddit comment which starts with "I know I'm going to be downvoted for this", nobody like the martyr argument. And assuming your own use case and global world stats to decide what browser to support is not a smart way to do things. Just look at the CIS market and it will tell you another story for Opera, not supporting Opera there "because it only has 1.6% worldwide" would be a dumb reasoning. What matters for your choice is the market share on your properties, not on others' properties.

bpatrianakos 14y ago
That's all in the interpretation. I saw nothing passive aggressive about what he said. He just stated his opinions (and what I believe to be many facts too) in a very mater-of-fact way. There's a difference between that and passive aggressive. As far as Opera goes though, you both have a point. If you really want to drill down into the data then your argument stands but generally speaking, without being oh so concerned and preoccupied with complete and totally accuracy (like we often are on HN and miss the forest for the trees because of) Opera really isn't much to worry about. It's a great browser and all but you can bet that if you're building a new web property you're not going to see a lot of Opera users with 1.6% market share worldwide. Sure, you might get lucky (or unlucky depending on how you see it) and somehow get a swarm of Opera users but I also might win the lottery this week too.
- tarabukka 14y ago
  Not passive aggressive? >the browser that nobody cares about >Now they see Chrome is going to win Implies that Opera never innovates or has anything interesting to offer, and implies that instead they follow the market leader like-for-like. They were one of the first browsers to have tabs and supported many CSS3 properties without prefixes first. Just because they didn't support WebSuperFlySpeedySocketRockets the day the draft standard was out doesn't mean they don't innovate. >copying Chrome They're standards compliant, Chrome is standards compliant. Not "copying" Chrome.

papsosouid 14y ago

>I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore You don't know very good web devs then. By far the easiest path as a developer is to develop for opera, then test the rest. You end up with far few problems that way. If you develop for firefox or chrome it is easy to write a bunch of stuff that works in that browser, but not in the other, and then you have way more work dealing with fixing it. Opera is strict enough that if it works there, it is almost certainly going to work everywhere else (not old IEs obviously).

freshhawk 14y ago

Amazing how communities that railed against monolithic implementations and stagnation in the past are perfectly happy with it when it's "their team" that's becoming the monolith.

Dylanlacey 14y ago
I'm not perfectly happy, there's not not much impact being unhappy is likely to have. Once a company makes a huge announcement like this, displeasure from the customer base is unlikely to cause them to change their minds until either they discover the change was a HUGE mistake and upsets lots of their customers and they lose significant market share OR they're forced to change because they go bankrupt.
- fpgeek 14y ago
  Being unhappy isn't likely to change Opera's decision, of course, but... the reaction to Opera's decision is likely to influence other players. For example, the difference between "bring on the monoculture" and "this is a sad day for web standards" is likely to influence Mozilla's future direction, both directly and indirectly (via the choices web developers make in supporting or not supporting Firefox).

prumek 14y ago

> they're switching to copying Chrome How so? Like Chrome copied Safari because they're both using Webkit? > They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about (aside from six people who are no doubt here in this thread somewhere), but your site will probably render fine on it. That's the problem for you Opera bashers. It will now have room to grow and get a much bigger user base on PCs.