YUI Theater — Andreas Bovens and David Storey: “10 Essential Things You Should Know about Supporting Opera”

October 12, 2009 at 7:48 am by Eric Miraglia | In YUI Theater | 3 Comments

Opera Software makes one of the most intriguing browsers on the market. Opera 10 is was released this summer to excellent reviews, and it’s undoubtedly the best Opera yet. Opera continues to enjoy deep regional pockets of strength, especially in Eastern Europe. (In Russia, Opera was the top browser for much of 2009). Meanwhile, Opera Mini continues to make headway in the low-powered device market.

On the other hand, by most global measures Opera continues to be a niche browser. For example, it recently has been eclipsed by the rapidly ascending Google Chrome browser in terms of traffic on the Yahoo! network; StatCounter shows Chrome at roughly doubling Opera’s share in the past month on a global basis.

In this talk, Andreas Bovens and David Storey, both of Opera, make the case that we as web development community can and should be continuing to support Opera as one of the top-tier, modern, standards-compatible browsers. The talk covers not just why you should support opera, but also how specifically to go about it.

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3 Comments

Opera is a great browser, except by one measure: usability. It lacks the polish of Safari, lacks the seemingly endless extensions of Firefox, and the effective UI of Chrome.

If the Opera UI was as good as the browser itself, I imagine a lot more people would use it.

Comment by shadowhand — October 12, 2009 #
The cost/benefit ratio just isn’t there for Opera as far as my traffic is concerned. Any extra work for Opera is both a development and forward maintenance burden that isn’t worth it for me.

With a global market share that small, they need to be supporting developers, not the other way around.

Comment by net — October 12, 2009 #
@shadowhand

Next to Chrome, Opera 10 has my favorite UI. It offers a nice middle ground between the ultra task-oriented simplicity of Chrome and the standard desktop app interfaces of browsers like IE and FF.

@net

If you ignore IE, Firefox (2.0-3.5) takes up a good 80% of my “solving annoying browser bugs” development time. Throw in 15% for Safari (3.2-4.0), and Chrome and Opera (9-10) combined take up that other 5%.

It is very, very, very rare that I have to tackle a browser-specific issue in Opera. For me, usually the only time things like that come up are for complex Ajax apps or for things that all browsers do differently like form elements.

So in my experience, the “cost/benefit ratio” of choosing to support/debug Opera has been totally awesome.

Comment by Josh L — October 13, 2009 #

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