Opera Reaches 1 Million Downloads Thanks To Google 287
auckland writes "More than one million people have downloaded the Opera browser in the days since Opera announced it was dropping the ad banner and going completely free. All made possible because Opera signed a search referral deal with Google." From the article: "'The current most important deal now is with Google,' the spokesperson said to Mr. Malik. That deal, and similar ones with Amazon and eBay, give those companies prime placement in the Opera search box. Mozilla has a similar arrangement with Google, with its search box and its default right-click menu search option on highlighted text sending queries straight to Mountain View."
yup (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmmmm. (Score:1, Interesting)
Doh!
So what is their business model? (Score:2, Interesting)
spreadopera dot com (Score:3, Interesting)
anyone else see a problem with this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Goooooooogle! (Score:3, Interesting)
*bats eyelashes*
Is there anything they cannot do?
kinda sick, heh?
But, hey, I remember when Micro Soft (original name) used to treat its users with a modicum of respect.
I clasp my hands and hope Google stays, well, relatively Good.
Right now, a diversity of free browsers looks pretty good.
This is not a good thing (Score:0, Interesting)
Now, we have Firefox. It's good. It does a pretty good job of supporting standards. It's available for all platforms, free of charge. It's also open source. As a web developer, I think there's no reason for anyone to use anything but firefox, barring any special need for ActiveX or some such proprietary thing.
Opera, while certainly better than IE, hurts the world wide web by dividing the population even further. With more browsers out there, I can't count on my (standards compliant) code working everywhere, and I have to add hacks for each browser to make it work. Things get even uglier when I try to write a "fat" web app - different browsers support radically different scripting standards.
The chances that all web developers can account for all browsers is slim, and this mean s that any given website is less likely to work in your browser of choice. We need to work to pick a browser and dominate the market with that browser. This is one case where a monopoly would be somewhat beneficial. Capitalism SHOULD take care of this: if a browser has shoddy standards support, people wouldn't use it. Unfortunately, John Q. Public knows next to nothing about standards, and so many sites are still coded to IE that they are broken in other browsers.
Anyway, the point is: No more browsers, please.
Lots of money in open source? (Score:4, Interesting)
So, remember, everytime you do a search in Firefox, some money goes from google to Mozilla, estimates ranging from 50 cents to 1 dollar per user per year.
A thought on how this affects CSS designs (Score:5, Interesting)
People talk about designing to the standards, but without a single web browser actually following said standards, web designers on the front lines have to work around different browser's quirks.
For example, a number of browsers support bits and pieces of CSS 3.0. Gecko and Webcore have support for opacity (translucent elements on a web page); Trident can do the same thing with the non-standard "Filter:" tag. However, Presto in Opera 8 has no support for this.
The workaround for Opera users is to use a translucent PNG instead. However, a translucent PNG used in mouseovers triggers a Firefox/Windows 1.0.x bug (probably fixed in Deer Park) where the mouseover image will not be loaded unless visible somewhere else on the page (I can mostly eliminate this bug by making the PNG in question visible on the page as a single 90% transparent pixel in the upper right hand corner. Which mostly, but not completely, works around the bug.)
Basically, with yet another CSS rendering browser out there gaining market share, while only implementing a subset of the CSS standard, web designers now have to work around the quirks of yet another browser. I like this kind of work, but a lot of designers hate this stuff and just throw their hands in the air and make their web page a 100% flash web page or what not.
Google as a many-tentacled monster (Score:3, Interesting)
This stockmarket-listed company's strategy is to 'organise the world's information'. The Internet is resembling one large Google Ad to rule them all!
Do we believe in the inherent goodness of this corporation's dollars as it buys, sponsors, advertises its way into open source?
Similar results: (Score:4, Interesting)
"best internet browser" gives you www.opera.com
"bad internet browser" gives you an article on Internet Explorer
"worst internet browser" gives you home.netscape.com
Amazing. Simply amazing.
No problem at all (Score:3, Interesting)
If FF and Opera can get Google to pay them for their users searching with Google, more power to 'em. Many would already be using Google in the first place, and the "Google box" is really convenient and easily switchable to some other search engine.
Of course, that last sentence reminds me a lot of "It's very convenient to bundle a web browser with an operating system and it's easy to choose a different one". Which is a true statement as well. With MSN and other competitors trying to take Google's place in search, Google is trying to keep their name first in the minds of the population running Opera and FF -- the population that often thinks of itself at the "net-elite" and is very likely to recommend things to "not-elite" friends. Which is exactly the advantage that Microsoft's IE has, that it's the first one there.
Interestingly enough, at least on FF1.0.6/GNULinux, you can't add new searches to the "googlebox". There's an "Add buttons" item, but it only adds a particular kind of bookmark that lets you type, say, "wp foobar" into the address bar and give you a wikipedia search for foobar. And they don't exactly document that fact well at all. So it does look like the "googlebox" is an exclusive space for Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Dictionary.com, eBay and Creative Commons (one of these things is not like the others?). I mean, of course, FF is open source and I could go through the code and change it. It's probably really easy. But what's interesting is the total lack of acknowledgement of the pay-for-space aspect of FF/Moz. I'd have thought I would have heard of it by now.
Whatever. It's non-intrusive and useful. If it gets intrusive I'll use something else. (Actually Opera getting rid of its adbar caused me to download it and I use it from time to time... so that bit of non-intrusiveness does count.)
Re:This is not a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Opera is older, and better, than Firefox, so by your "logic" it is Firefox that is dividing the population even further. I assume that you wish we were all using Mosaic?
TWW
Re:Lots of money in open source? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not true. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation the Mozilla Foundation is required to file disclosure paperwork with the IRS every year. These disclosure filings (called Forms 990) are public and searchable via GuideStar [guidestar.org] (requires free registration).
The Mozilla Foundation's 990s [guidestar.org] are, it's true, only current to 2003. But that's not due to any deep conspiracy; it's just because they didn't file the 2003 990 until October 2004. So you shouldn't expect to see the 2004 disclosure until a year or so after that (October-November 2005).
If you want to spin a conspiracy theory, a more plausible one would involve the recent formation of the "Mozilla Corporation" [mozilla.org] as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Foundation. It's unclear to me if money paid to such an entity would need to be disclosed or not (it would definitely have to be reported to the IRS, but possibly in a way that isn't public like the 990 data). If not, it's possible that one of the motivations for the formation of the Corporation would be to accept large donations from parties like Google without having them show up on the Foundation's public disclosures -- but that's unlikely since Google has been the default search engine in Firefox since 0.1, and the Corporation has only existed since August of this year. So any payments from Google would have to have been pretty recent for this to be plausible.
You can now go back to your regularly scheduled tinfoil-hat fashion show ;-)
Re:This is not a good thing (Score:2, Interesting)
Opera is better than IE, you're right about that. In many ways it's better than Firefox (and Firefox copied many of it's features from Opera).
Now, before you fan boys start slobbering all over your keyboards, try Opera out. Check out how quickly you can go between pages in your history. Using Opera right now, I can use a tightly integrated mouse gesture (which I didn't have to find, download, restart my browser, test and if I didn't like it do it over again) to go bach to the last page and then back forward and what I am typing will still be here. Try that in Firefox.
When a new version comes out, everything still works- I don't have to go re-install a ton of extensions to get it how I like it. The new trashcan is awesome- if I close a tab, I can re-open it at any time (as long as I didn't quit the application) and not only will it reopen instantly, but it retains it's history.
That being said, there are lots of cool things about Firefox that Opera doesn't allow. Many of the extensions are very specific to things people do online, and it would not make sense to integrate that into a browser like Opera since most people wouldn't use them. There are times in the day I will use both- Opera for general browsing and FF for specific things I do.
It's amazingly asinine of you to say that you'd have to worry about your standards compliant code not working on various browsers. Have you seen the acid2 page in Opera vs. Firefox vs. IE recently? IE blows ass on it, but Opera and Firefox are pretty damn close, with Opera just barely better (thought neither is perfect). If you write standards compliant code and a browser can't support it, then who is at fault?
You said it yourself- market forces will correct it. People are, for the most part pretty ignorant about what a browser is, but it is steadily improving, and a company like Opera ASA making a move like this will actually help educate people. Opera ASA is still a for profit company who is making a profit in spite of giving away it's browser. It's a somewhat risky but clever move on their part. As more people try Opera and the word about the company and the quality of the software it makes gets out, more people will want to try their comercial software. Opera ASA decided to release their browser for free to build mindshare, and it seems like it's working. Now, imagine if they decided to do some real marketing - on TV to get Joe Sixpack. He would learn in 30 seconds that IE is NOT "the internet" and that he can try another browser. The Mozilla Foundation could do this as well, but I don't know if they have the cash laying around that Opera does.
BTW, for a laugh, on Win XP right click IE on the start tab and delete it. It will warn you with "Are you sure you want to delete the internet from your start menu?" Dear lord, who would ever want to delete the internet from their computer after spending so much time downloading it?!
Re:This is not a good thing (Score:2, Interesting)
See, you seem to think that if there was one supreme browser that was open sourced, everything would be groovy. I have news for you... there's this little thing called the 90% problem. More specifically, the problem with a lot of open source software is that it gets mostly finished (to the point where it is usable for the average geek - not for 'Joe Sixpack') and then the developers go on to other, more interesting projects. See, they're not being compensated for their time, so they want to work on what is 'fun' or 'exciting' instead of fixing the last couple of problems with a piece of software. Now, a non-open source company, like Opera, has a financial incentive to write that last 10%, however, a group of open source developers, like those working on Firefox, who are not getting paid to write user-friendly code, have virtually no incentive to go the 'last mile'. Plus, paid developers have to listen to their users, or they risk alienating their customers. Open Source developers are free to be horribly rude to their users and can ignore usability problems (becasue they feel that the way *they* use the software is the only correct way*) becuase they have no financial incentive to listen to their users.
Now, you're probably going to post a rude reply about how I must simply be a Microsoft apologist because I don't worship FireFox. To try and prevent that (not that it'll do any good), I would like to state that I believe that having multiple open source and closed source browsers all competing in the marketplace is the best way to spur innovation. Also, all things being equal, I will always pick open source software over *equal* closed source wares.
Finally, as someone who has been doing web development since Mosaic reigned supreme, it is my opinion that the current browser that is the closest to w3c compliance is Opera. Granted, it might not display everything quite the way you expect it to display (or quite the way it displays in FireFox), but before you start pointing and screaming about how Opera sucks, and FireFox is more compliant... go back and re-read the actual standards (you *have* read them thoroughly, haven't you?). Most of the time, I think you will find that Opera is actually conforming to the published standards, and that what you thought it *should* look like is actually due to a mis-reading of the standards (or possibly due to a false expectation, based upon FireFox's mis-rendering).
Bah... I'm really not anti-FireFox, despite the tone fo this post. I just get annoyed when people assume that FireFox (or even open source in general) is always the best. That mentality is almost as bad the people who think IE is the internet!
All of that said, I'm *still* waiting for any browser other than IE5+ or NS4 to support embedded fonts! =)
* I realize the tone of this is a tad bitter - I had a horrible experience when I submitted a FireFox bug a few months ago. Basically, FireFox was not following a w3c xhtml specification and when I submitted the bug, I got rudly told that the developers felt that the w3c's spec was not the right way to implement something, so FireFox would not be following that particular spec... Oh, and by the way: How dare I question the wisdom of the mighty and always-correct FireFox developers. Needless to say, I now consider FireFox my browser of last resort!
It will be rock-solid before it's popular (Score:3, Interesting)
Opera's internal buils are very close to passing Acid2.
Opera 9, AKA Merlin [timaltman.com], is adding XSLT, designMode, more CSS3 stuff and "HTML5" [whatwg.org].