Opera: Firefox User Figures 'Inflated' 810
Anonymous Coward writes "ZDNet
notes, 'The chief executive of Opera Software claimed on Monday that the market share figures for Mozilla Firefox are inflated, due to its support for link prefetching" In addition, "Opera has a better caching mechanism so it doesn't access Web sites as often as other browsers" and "Opera is configured by default to identify itself as Internet Explorer' "
This is Interesting (Score:2, Funny)
Re:This is Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
Finally, there is nothing remotely "silly" about a web browser. You may only use it to make snide comments on Slashdot, but web browsers support hundreds of billions of dollars in business, which, I would argue, is far from silly. The security and availability of such a program is quite important, really.
Re:This is Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
No, this is about not sucking. The standards are out there, and do not require comparisons to other browsers. I know browsers are important software, but they still don't justify continuing this idiotic "browser war" nonsense. I'm sick of war, I'm sick of war metaphors, and "silly" was the kindest euphimism I could use to describe the negative reaction I'm having to all the god damned posturing.
I use a web browser that doesn't suck, and it happens to be Firefox, but I will not join your damn crusades.
Re:This is Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
I conform to standards as best I can when building web pages, surf with Safari on my Mac and Firefox on my work PC... but I would gladly switch to IE without hesitation if Microsoft were to make a browser that does the job better, just as I once dropped Netscape Navigator for IE 5.
I love western civilization in general, but this is the one part of our culture which drives me nuts lately: the completely vicarious "us"-versus-them cheerleading... what I like to call the "sports fan" mentality.
"I usually vote Democrat, so everytime a car-bomb goes off in Iraq, I'm happy because it makes Bush's decision to go to war look worse."
"I'm a protestant, so every time another story about a cover-up of pedophile priests comes out, I'm giddy with laughter over the human tragedy, because it's a huge embarrassment to Catholics."
"I'm a Linux user, so every time Microsoft users are hit with a virus which shuts down entire companies for the day and costs the US economy millions of dollars, I can barely contain my joy."
Fuck all of you! Groups you are "rooting against" doing poorly, or even groups you are "rooting for" doing well, does nothing to make you a better person, nor does it actually make the world a better place. Get some goddamn perspective and stop being so myopic about your little meaningless dogma! You sound just like a little kid arguing with the neighbor kid over who's faster, Superman or The Flash.
Re:This is Interesting (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This is Interesting (Score:3, Funny)
[comic book guy]
Clearly, despite several ties and the interference of other Galactic Super Beings [hyperborea.org] the Flash was faster.
Worst... argument... ever...
[/comic book guy]
(ps, I thought your argument was spot on)
Re:This is Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
Virtually *everyone* would switch to Windows+IE if it was truly better (in the ways important to them) than the alternatives. But almost *no* MS offering is actually the best available.
Fuck all of you! Groups you are "rooting against" doing poorly, or even groups you are "rooting for" doing well, does nothing to make you a better person, nor does it actually make the world a better place.
Are you sure? For every time MS loses an IE customer to Firefox, just that many fewer people will get hit with malware, that many fewer shady organizations will make money on spyware, and MS might, just maybe, be forced into making IE better.
So yes, it most certainly *can* and *does* make the world a better place, and *can* and *does* make you a better person.
Get some goddamn perspective and stop being so myopic about your little meaningless dogma!
Yeah, most people are dogmatic and stupid, so you're right there. But rooting for a rationally chosen side not "myopic".
You sound just like a little kid arguing with the neighbor kid over who's faster, Superman or The Flash.
And then you post that neither is faster, but you use Superman to deliver your mail since he's faster right now, yet would gladly call on the Flash if he could speed up a bit.
Re:This is Interesting (Score:3, Funny)
You sound just like a little kid arguing with the neighbor kid over who's faster, Superman or The Flash.
Superman has more bandwidth, and The Flash has lower latency.
Duh....
Re:This is Interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
You are a poor student of history if you think the standards are out there, and don't require comparisons to other browsers. Do you even understand why Netscape chose to open source their browser? Do you know what was at
Re:This is Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
F1R3F0X 4EV4R LOLOLOLZY
Re:This is Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
And Google only supports Mozilla's prefetching for a couple of weeks. Before that, Firefox's market share wasn't significantly lower, was it? Besides, only the raw source code gets prefetched as far as I know. Scripts, images and the like are only executed/loaded when a user actually visits the page. So, when Firefox prefetches a site, it should be visible in the site's logs, but I don't think it could trigger a third-party counter/tracker. Also, Google only prefetches certain sites, not any site.
And that Opera identifies itself as IE is a valid concern, but that's Opera's fault, and nothing that would inflate Firefox's version numbers, just IE's.
Re:This is Interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
I avoid IE because of security problems, but ironically I need to use it to get Windows security patches.
They do say "If you prefer to use a different Web browser, updates to Windows may be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center [microsoft.com]", though.
Re:This is Interesting (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This is Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
Your other point is valid, but this one is not. The problem isn't that the prefetch and the hit are counter seperately as 2 hits, but that the prefetch without a hit is counter as a hit.
Re:This is Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
I agree that Opera is a decent browser and they've been decent for a long time. I just don't want to pay for a browser or be forced to view advertisements. And thanks to Firefox, I don't have to.
My only complaint is that Firefox seems to run painfully slow on OSX.
Re:This is Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd hardly say stuffed. I have an ad-bar of google text ads in neutral colours just below my menu bar.
Opera is free too, free with ads. I don't mind. It does tabbed browsing 'better' than Firefox, it is more stable than Firefox, it has a smaller footprint than Firefox (on WinXP SP2), it has many UI features 'better' than Firefox.
By 'better' I mean:
Enhanced text searching
Voice
Scaling options
Tabs (opti
he may be right, but (Score:5, Funny)
who's fault is that?
Re:he may be right, but (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:he may be right, but (Score:2)
Read: Microsoft websites
Re:damn the mouth-breathing majority!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't that fraud?
No. Fraud is about using lies for direct financial gain, and requires specific intent. Opera identifies itself as IE for interoperability purposes, something that "modern" tech laws (such as the DMCA) protect.
Plus, the whole point of the www is that it is browser independent. So this is unstandard behavior, and should be shunned(2).
I'm sure Grandma will think it's great that her bank and realtor websites don't work because Opera is taking a stand.
The real blame for this lies first in Netscape (which extended the web in many incompatible ways, but at least worked on every OS) and later in Microsoft (who used Netscape's tactics to sew up the web). If Tim Berners-Lee was dead, I'm sure he'd be rolling in his grave. Instead he's had to settle for being alive and helping correct this nonsense. [w3.org]
Re:damn the mouth-breathing majority!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:he may be right, but (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:he may be right, but (Score:5, Insightful)
MSIE UserAgent strings are already full of extra garbage.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1;
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98) via Avirt Gateway Server v4.2
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProducts; SV1)
You tag the useragent as "Opera" without ruining the MSIE spoofing by simply adding "Opera; " or "OWB; " after the OS string.
It's a stupid issue anyway. Opera Software knows exactly how many users have current licenses and how many users are downloading banners for the adware version. Opera's userbase is simple to track without making any estimations.
Re:he may be right, but (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:he may be right, but (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:he may be right, but (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:he may be right, but (Score:5, Funny)
Re:he may be right, but (Score:5, Funny)
Re:he may be right, but (Score:5, Funny)
Re:he may be right, but (Score:3, Funny)
Re:he may be right, but (Score:5, Insightful)
If I ran around telling everyone my name is Frank, would it be a suprise to find out that nobody knows my name?/p>
If many major department stores and government buildings had someone at the door asking, "is your name Frank," and then refusing entry to anyone who said "no" and then most newspapers reported that Frank is the most popular name in the country after asking department stores and government agencies who would be at fault?
It's perfectly valid to question the accuracy of browser market share statistics given the fact that it is often technologically advantageous or even necessary to misidentify.
Re:he may be right, but (Score:4, Interesting)
It's perfectly valid to question the accuracy of browser market share statistics given the fact that it is often technologically advantageous or even necessary to misidentify.
An illustration to your point:
I go to NetLibrary, and a page informs me my browser is not supported, may I download some of the following:
Internet Explorer 5.5 and above
Netscape 6.2 and above
Mozilla 1.1 and above
Firefox 1.0 and above
Safari 1.0 and above
Opera 7.0 and above
Hey, the morons at NetLibrary! I'm using Opera 8! Knock, knock...Somebody there?
The best part, I tell Opera to identify as Explorer, and in I go, with no other change.
I'm still wondering if these guys are beyond stupid or somebody pays them to make alternative browsers look bad.
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
Re:he may be right, but (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:he may be right, but (Score:3, Informative)
Because, as was discussed here recently, there have been sites (mostly owned by Microsoft) that actively sabotage pages sent to Opera users, by using CSS that cause the content to be garbled. It was shown that only requests with "Opera" in the ID string had this problem. (Changing it to "Oprah" made the pages display properly.
I haven't (yet) read about this being done to firefox. Anyone know if it's happ
Re:he may be right, but (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, if you're at Cheers.
Re:he may be right, but (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I'm being serious. It's not quite everyone, but there a good portion of websites will give non-working output or refuse to give full functionality if you give them the opera user agent string. If you give them IE or even usually Mozilla, they give complete working output.
Off the top of my head, I know msdn (thinks opera is a bot that wants feeds or something) and gmail (just reverts to basic non-js functionality) do this. Personally, when I use opera, I always just leave it identifying itself as IE or moz since I forget to change it back.
I think a point to Opera is that they aren't so small as everyone thinks, but they ended up in a corner. They can't tell the truth or certain sites won't work (oh noes, opera sucks) or they lie (oh noes, noone uses it!) so they work, which is where they are now.
Re:he may be right, but (Score:3, Insightful)
That's true, but it has not been TESTED with Opera. The thinking by the suits is that they don't want to pay people to test every part of a big web site with every browser in the world. If they can test two browsers and cover a huge percentage of all users, it becomes cost effective. Since the suits don't want customer complains from untested browsers and then have to pay people to do support, they completely block some bro
Re:he may be right, but (Score:5, Informative)
I reverted to using Firefox for a while, but now I'm happily back to using Opera. Been a happy, registered user since 5.0.
Re:he may be right, but (Score:5, Funny)
Re:he may be right, but (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:he may be right, but (Score:5, Funny)
Re:he may be right, but (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:he may be right, but (Score:3)
I've NEVER seen a comment end up as underrated or overrated. Why is that? Are funny, insightful, troll, and the other ones we ever see just the dominant alleels(sic, probably)?
Mod me underrated!
Re:he may be right, but (Score:5, Informative)
Under and over rated, to my understanding, are the generic +1 and -1 options. It covers all the reasons you might want to adjust a comment but don't have existing options for, like 'Completely wrong' or 'Proper use of iambic pentameter in a ruby script'. It never gets listed as the reason though -- if I modded you under (or over) rated right now instead of commenting, your score would go up or down, but no word would appear next to the score.
It Might Be Worse Than That.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Irresponsible as hell (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Irresponsible as hell (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Irresponsible as hell (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Irresponsible as hell (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Irresponsible as hell (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Irresponsible as hell (Score:5, Informative)
Re:he may be right, but (Score:3, Interesting)
And just to reply to myself...
A story on El Reg today:
Were a study to be done using Opera, I'm sure similar figures would be obtained.Firefox users turned away from 10% of top UK sites [theregister.co.uk]
Hey (Score:5, Funny)
If that's true (Score:2, Funny)
WHAT!? (Score:2, Funny)
Ce n'est possible!
Opera versus Firefox (Score:2)
Still, I tried Opera and I find it's interface cluttered and messy. Firefox is much leaner feeling, and has a much better tabbed-browsing implementation, IMO.
Sam
Re:Opera versus Firefox (Score:3, Informative)
Relying on the headers the browser sends to figure out stats on browser usage is a dicey proposition at best. A statistically significant survey of Internet users would yield better results, but who's going to pay for that?
EricDescriptions of my books [ericgiguere.com]
strange math (Score:5, Insightful)
Whose fault is it? (Score:4, Insightful)
And whose fault is that? Maybe if you would default your browser to itself rather than trying to pass itself off as someone else the statistics would show an even deeper drop in IEs marketshare and an increase in your share.
Re:Whose fault is it? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not saying that's the case, but the thought came to mind....and for the record I actually purchased a copy of Opera a few years ago.
Re:Whose fault is it? (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if there's a reason why Opera doesn't reveal these numbers....
Identify (Score:2)
so why not identify yourself as Opera? Why not take a chunk out of IE's numbers and not Firefoxes?
Re:Identify (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone know if Opera is now or ever has been a profitable company? I really hope so, because even with low stats a profitable browser company that competes with both free bundled IE and free firefox makes a powerful statement.
Opera isn't firefox (duh?) (Score:3, Interesting)
In related news.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Who cares? (Score:2)
Thanks Opera! (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, they provide skewed data that helps Microsoft present itself as leader of the browser market. That's intelligent, way to go. At least you could have picked up a F/OSS browser to masquerade Opera...
Double-click (Score:5, Interesting)
Bug 55279 tried to fix this five years ago. But the feeling was that Mozilla users were smarter than the average user and wouldn't do this (which may have been true back then). Bug 238159 attempted to address just one aspect of the problem, double-clicking submit forms (which causes tons of race conditions). But again, nobody seems to care.
Re:Double-click (Score:5, Insightful)
You've got to be joking? Yes, sure it is wasteful to send another request when there could be the option to catch and ignore double clicks... but doubling market share? Nobody in their right mind decides marketshare by counting GET requests - even the simplest stats package will count the number of visits rather than number of hits ('visits' is a very vague term, but generally it groups all the hits from the same IP/browser/hour as a single visit)
Re:Double-click (Score:3, Interesting)
Within the last month, I've been stung by exactly such race conditions -- but we found that it was only possible to double-submit a form in IE. In Firefox the second click was ignored.
Re:Double-click (Score:3, Informative)
Really? IE doesn't. In fact, there's an MSDN page that describes the ondblclick event that fires when someone double-clicks a DHTML element:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/r e ference/events/ondblclick.asp [microsoft.com]
The only reason I know this is because we actively use this event at work (Don't shoot: it wasn't my idea).
--
Mando
Link prefetching? (Score:3)
BTW, the same could be said about IE but because of another reason... It does visit a whole buttload of pages, which the user never asked it to go to...
Re:Link prefetching? (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox only prefetches links when the links are marked on the previous site as "hey you might want to prefetch this".
Specifically on Google, only the top result is marked as prefetch. And even then, only when Google has determined that most visitors would choose it. Google has said that they mark it for things such as prefetching cnn.com when somebody searches for "CNN".
The article states: "...which means that Firefox will pre-load the top search results into its cache." which is innacurate. It should say "...which means that Firefox will pre-load the top search result into its cache when Google thinks there is a very high probability you will visit the first result."
Currency exchange rate calculator and foreign exchange converter [coinmill.com]
Forgot a reason for Opras Low stats. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well yea there are some die hards and I am sure it is a great Browser and all. But with firefox as a viable free alternitive without the adds why bother.
Who cares about the technical details? (Score:5, Insightful)
Opera is nice, but the Opera execs should realize already that they can't sell their browser when their customers can download a perfectly good one for free.
consequently.. (Score:3, Funny)
The results: (Score:3, Funny)
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Firefox! Firefox!
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Firefox! Firefox!
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Firefox Firefox!
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera--AAH, its I-E!
IIIEEE, III...oooh, its IEE!!!
its an Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, Opera, Opera,
Opera, Opera, O
Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
"A lot of people don't like our ads, which is sad as we don't have a rich sugar daddy like the Mozilla Foundation. They [the Mozilla Firefox team] don't have to think about money as they're being funded. We're not being funded," said von Tetzchner.
Rich Suger Daddy?!? No. Firefox users feel generous enough to donate to the foundation to help support a great FREE browser. This type of competition bashing is not good for business.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
More like, AOL gave them $2,000,000 and Mitch Kapor gave them $300,000. I'd imagine that user contributions pale in comparison to those.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
AOL gave them that money 2 years ago. With just salaries alone its likely all gone.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Second of all, tt doesn't matter who funds the Foundation... if people don't like something about a product, people won't use it. People hate the advertising bar in Opera, and won't use it. People don't find the features in Opera valueable enough to pay for it.
I am not going to choose what product I use based on sympathy and excuses. If a for-profit company wants me to give them my money, they are going to have to give something of equal value to me in return.
This is wholly inaccurate (Score:4, Funny)
Aren't all market share numbers hyped? (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet I have reinstalled Windows 10 times in the past few years, and each time I update IE and download several other software packages over and over again.
And as far as actual web usage, those stats must be all over the place because some sites do a better job of cross browser compatibility than others and other sites, like Slashdot, appeal to a non-IE crowd while still others, like MSN, do not.
So this whole article should really just be a reminder to not believe everything someone else wants you to.
Quick survey (Score:5, Interesting)
You do the same thing with Firefox, and people know what you're talking about as mcu as they don't.
I don't need any hard stats and figures to know that Firefox has made a more profound impact on people and the internet than many other things in a long time.
Some anicdotal info (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the first time I have ever heard of a tech support person, save at AOL/Netscape, recommending an alternative web browser.
Is it Just Google Prefetching? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perfect solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Then we'll see just how fast Microsoft can get a security update out when their web monopoly is being threatened.
Theory about User-Numbers (Score:3, Interesting)
Opera users use a browser with ready-to-use all useful features included (and not many unneeded ones) probably because they are pragmatic about the issue. This kind of person doesn't go out and tells everyone and their dog how good the software they use is, they just use it and do something useful in the time they save by not configuring Firefox Extensions new after each minor update and not advocating their browser all the time.
So as a conclusion the word of mouth effect for Firefox is much higher even though the browser is much less useful.
Yeah, ok... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry Opera, you lose.
Opera's speed claims are inflated! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Now why? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Someone's jealous, methinks (Score:5, Funny)
I got something in my email inbox this morning which might help with this situation. Perhaps I should forward it to you.
Re:Switcher (Score:3, Interesting)
Not if they want to count correctly. Take, for example, the handful of IP addresses that represent AOL's proxies. Thousands of unique visitors could be behind the traffic from half a dozen IP addresses. For many corporate networks (hell, or schools, for that matter), you could easily have a few hundred surfers popping out of the firewall on a single IP address. Nope... to track visitors you've got to
Re:Caching (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yeah well... (Score:3, Informative)
Basically, Opera always used to put Opera in it's UA string. They would constantly get blocked from sites for no reason (if you used proxomitron and blatently lied to the site to get past the checker, it worked perfectly).
Opera's customers asked for a way to hide that they were using Opera (check the forums, this went on for years). In Opera 8, you now are able to hide what browser you are using completely. Heck, Opera takes