This article reflects my personal beliefs. You don’t have to agree with me, but please don’t look down on me either. I will welcome any objective criticism. How it started for me: I was using Opera sometime around 2007-08. It suited me in terms of features and above all in terms of flexibility and customizability.
I still value this about Opera today, but more on that below. At first, Opera may seem a bit confusing to anyone. It has settings that I change right after a clean install (mainly tab handling). But once you set it up to your liking, you may no longer have any reason to switch it for anything else.
Simply put, every browser has its flaws, and from my point of view Opera comes out best in this respect. Chrome is simplistic, Firefox is slow and clunky, and IE is completely different from other browsers; releasing a new version only once in a while doesn’t suit me either. Firefox and IE carry a legacy from the beginning of the PC era, and while Chrome was built from scratch, that alone doesn’t completely redeem it for me.
You might object that Opera carries the biggest unpleasant legacy of all, since its era began under the strong influence and popularity of the Mosaic browser, that is, in 1993, back then still within Televerket (today Telenor – the Norwegian telephone company), which only in 1995 created the independent company Opera Software.
Disadvantages of Opera
So that I am not just throwing dirt at other browsers while leaving Opera alone, I have to admit that lately development has not been as intensive as it once was, when Opera was the leader in introducing new features as well as proposals of the consortium W3C. Opera is a small company with a limited budget.
Of course, everything depends on its market share. On this blog, it looks like this:
But that is not the case everywhere. I’m glad that you visit my blog more often through Opera than, for example, through Firefox (and convincingly so, Opera has twice as many visits). Overall, Opera has an average share of the worldwide internet of about 2%. Opera is funded mainly by Google, which pays for it, and in return Opera keeps it as its default search engine. The current contract runs until 2014. I don’t know of any other search engine that funds it, even though Opera can search about 15 search engines by default, including some Czech websites such as Mall, Heureka or Aukro.cz.
Another thing, not so much a disadvantage, is that Opera has no integrated Jabber client. The thing is, to this day I chat in the ancient Google Talk client, which dates back to 2001 and since then has practically not changed nor gone through any real development. That’s why it would be nice if Opera had its own Jabber client, and ideally, just like GTalk, chat history would be saved online in Gmail. Opera also has its own webmail, but more on that below. From the point of view of an extension developer, Opera is probably the worst of all browsers.
I have no experience with developing for IE; FF has some great extensions that other browsers lack, but you can see that lately FF is running out of breath and Google Chrome is pushing to the front. It is Chrome that, even though its API doesn’t offer as many possibilities as FF’s, has lots of extensions because of which I simply can’t drop Chrome completely, and you probably can’t either. I tried to develop the same extension for both Chrome and Opera. For Chrome, I had it done in a day; for Opera, not even in 4 days, and then I gave up. Google tries to simplify extension development as much as possible – for example, I was completely blown away when I saw working ‘intellisense’/code completion in various editors – all it took was setting up 2 JS files in them.
So those are the 2 reasons why Opera doesn’t have as many extensions – a small developer base and the difficulty of developing and debugging extensions.
What Exactly Is Opera?
Opera is not just a web browser. Besides the web browser itself, Opera has lots of extra features, such as the already mentioned webmail, and on the web side it also has my.opera.com, a whole web suite where you can blog, you have your own profile there (mine is at http://my.opera.com/sunamo ), it’s a kind of social network, because you can add people you know as friends or connect existing social networks, work with groups, with permissions for your blog and photos (who can view them, etc.), create polls and, last but not least, there are also statistics.
They are just simple ones like “You have 155 visits. Your blog has been visited 155 times. There have been 0 visits to your photo albums.” but they are enough for basic needs. I like the blog features the most, but so far I have no reason to leave Blogger, where I have such a great template. That’s My Opera. And what about the features built right into Opera? For me, a mail client is a must, supporting multiple accounts, of course. Then Opera has an IRC client and a newsgroup reader. I don’t use either of them; I don’t need to be constantly plugged into one room (or even several) and waste time checking what’s new.
How Do I Restrict Browsers to Specific Purposes?
Through a Chrome extension. You see, in Chrome I play music from Google Music, I also work with my Twitter account @sunamoDevProg, and otherwise I only download videos from YT. The 1st and 3rd reasons are because of an extension that Opera doesn’t have, namely scrobbling played songs to Google Music. That’s why in Chrome I have the SiteBlock extension with blocking set up for these websites: * //Everything blocked, except for the lines below starting with + +play.google.com/music +youtube.com +twitter.com +accounts.google.com +music.google.com
Opera Being Bought by Facebook?
I’m not entirely sure about this question yet, but I would rather see Facebook buy Opera. In general, Facebook is something I don’t like much, but who would care about my opinion? – if Opera wants to be a competitive web browser. We’ll see. If I’ve sparked your interest in Opera, don’t hesitate to download it O:-).