punkrockstories

I saw announcements recently that Opera was now a free download. The comments I read at Anne’s site and 456 Berea St seemed positive and some seemed genuinely hopeful that Opera would now become a force in the desktop browser market place.

While I have no strong feelings about Opera one way or another I can’t see it happening.

Opera has always had a free version, y’know, the one with the banner ads?. Opera didn’t gain much prominence when it was “free”. I can’t see that changing now it’s free.

I don’t think that users really care about banner ads if it allows people to get what they need. Look at Kazaa. That had banner ads (and spyware) but was installed and used by many people - I don’t know the figures for installation/use so I’m being purposely vague. Anyway, my point is that I don’t think banner ads was ever really Opera’s problem.

I’ve tried various versions of Opera over the last few years starting with either 3.x or 4.x (I can’t remember) and have found the claims of it being a fast loading browser to be true when using the back or forward buttons on a cached page but it didn’t grab me enough for me to use as a main browser. It’s number 3 on the list of browsers I reach for to test pages in which is why it still lives on my dev machine, doing strange things to my layouts. That could simply be my coding although Andy Budd seems to think it’s all Operas fault.

Let’s face it, Firefox isn’t even that great a browser. The underlying engine (Gecko) is but I’ve never been very happy with the browser UI. Any browser UI for that matter but that’s a story for another day.

So, Opera’s problem? Mozilla has been around for a number of years but was only used by those looking for an alternative. IE users were still saying “so what, I’m happy with things as they are”. Firefox only took off once people started spreading the (security) benefits of it over Internet Explorer. Even if Opera started marketing their browser along the same lines are those that made the switch from IE to Firefox going to switch again. Why would they? Too little, too late.

There we have it then. Opera doesn’t sit behind IE and Firefox because it has/had banner ads. It just wasn’t sold to the masses very well. It’ll be interesting to see what Opera does on Linux where desktop users are more likely to chop and change apps and try new things but I won’t be holding my breath.

Just a quick note to wish my sister and her husband Jez a happy birthday. Yep, they share the same birthday, although there’s an age difference of 52 years.

Just kidding. It’s 27 years difference :)