I don't use Opera and I never test it because the user base is not big enough to matter. My experience with Opera has always resulted in broken websites because of their poor rendering engine (in my opinion). I still can't believe the Opera browser has existed from the beginning of browsers and still exists today and their market share hasn't really gone up significantly.
In places like Russia or the CSI countries, Opera is the leading browser, with between 24% to 40% market share. It's not a browser you want to ignore if you want to appeal to those markets.
Oh well, I never really targeted those countries. Where I worked previously we simply looked at our browser statistics and Opera was below 1% so we ditched it pretty quickly, unless one feature was really broken to the point where the vital tasks cannot be done (1% of a really huge user base still counts a little). We would often have an "if Opera" and replace our pages with a stripped-down version that worked on Opera. For every other minor bug and rendering differences, Opera was completely ignored.
Sadly there's a vicious cycle of Opera having small marketshare, being ignored, causing it to keep small market share.
Opera's biggest problem is lack of support for -webkit-* properties, they only support unprefixed ones or -o-* ;)
Honestly, the engine is quite good. For Opera web standards support is a matter of life and death (they know they don't have market share to get sites being bug-compatible with them) and they put lots of effort into getting things right.
Hence why I added (in my opinion) right after. What's misleading and ignorant in stating an opinion? I didn't state that as a fact. For the few times where I had to fix things in Opera (can't remember which version it was but it's no more than 2-3 years ago) the rendering was really off compared to FF, Chrome and even IE.
Use it only for desktop and mobile (of course). The desktop version is somewhat "heavy" so I tend to use Chrome on lapotops etc. But in a way I feel that Opera is a more complete browser. The speedial is genius, and with the ability to make extensions for it, it has alot more potensial.
The other thing I really like, which I have been unable to find in other browser (that is equally good) is mousegestures. After just a bit of use, it gets in your muscles and creating and closing tabs, moving back and forth between pages has never been easier. My 5 cents.
I've found Opera to be fairly lightweight. It handles large numbers of tabs with (a bit) less memory usage than Chrome. Admittedly, this is because it's not a multi-process browser. It does mean that it functions well on machines with limited resources.
Opera may have rich functionality, but it's done with very little code footprint:
Opera's Mac executable is 22MB, Chrome's is 57MB! (in their private frameworks, both i386-only)
Opera adjusts RAM usage proportionally to amount of RAM in the machine, so if you have several GB of RAM it might look large, but it scales down to 512MB machines. RAM usage is mostly DOM cache for fast Back button.
Functionality like Mail and RSS used to be in a 200KB DLL on Windows.
I used to use it on Symbian, but since moving to an iPhone it’s not an option. Well, there’s Opera Mini but that’s really not a great experience on iOS.
Regarding the desktop browser, I prefer to use open-source browsers, and (imho) Dragonfly isn’t as good as Firebug.
Yeah, though I do find having Firefox as well helps occasionally (mostly fb if I'm honest)
Main browser across Windows and Ubunutu (and OSX when I used that)
Having DragonFly - native DOM inspector, built in rather than external like FF is really very good. (In my experience some plugins seem to kill the perf of FF)
Continually recommend it to replace people's bundled mobile phone brower - well Opera Mobile.
Subjectively, Opera manages a large number of tabs much better for me than FF, and has a much nicer UI than Chrome. They seem to do a lot of innovation in browser UI and features, which the other browsers eventually copy (not that there's anything wrong with that).
I really wish it had more marketshare so it would be better supported, but 95% of websites and features work without issue.
I think Opera and Google Chrome combined would make the best browser. Opera has some great UX benefits over chrome, but completely lacks in some obvious ones. The toolbar, homepage setup, settings, buttons, tabs, are all superior in Opera hands down (in my opinion of course). Chrome wins with it's highlight + right-click + actions, obvious hotkeys, developer tools, and many other intricacies that Opera misses or handles poorly (for instance I cannot even stretch out a textarea in Opera).
I use Opera, Chrome and Firefox equally. I use every other browser too for testing.
I use it as my main browser.
Never had problems with canvas performance. Most websites don't use canvas anyway.
I tried almost all browsers (except Safari) and the latest versions (>9) got me hooked. I like the screenshots inside the tabs (when you drag them down). It is looking clean, doing what I want, nice developer tools. I like it a lot!
Opera's drawImage is also an order of magnitude slower than Chrome 14, IE9 and FF5. Note that in this link the FF8Beta, Ipad, and the first two Chrome versions were ran by someone else's machine, so those results can't be compared with the other numbers.
I used Chrome for over a year and just recently went back to Opera. I have open bug reports for various bookmark problems in Chrome that have been ignored by the Chrome developers for several versions now. The chrome bookmarks code (and syncing) just needs to be thrown out and rewritten. It's a steaming pile of dung. I've even tried deleting them wholesale and letting chrome resync the whole bunch - it will only sync 100 per day as some sort of throttling mechanism, so it took a month for all of them to synchronize.
I do run into an occasional problem with Opera, for example, in Google docs, you can't upload a document. But for me, bookmarks are very important (I have over 5 thousand of them) and chrome can't handle them correctly.
I fired chrome's bookmark sync and went back to xmarks. Works much better, though even xmarks still complains about chrome bookmark sync interfering (how? it's supposedly turned off) and asks me to redownload my bookmarks to one machine or another.
I use opera occasionally on my iPhone. Most common use case is when I'm playing a stream or podcast directly in Safari and I want to surf at the same time. Opera is surprisingly fast and works well considering that all the rendering is done remotely.
I voted for main browser (desktop), but it's not entirely true.
At work, IE8 is mandated (though I did manage to score Chromium recently and switch over).
At home, I've kept the same Opera session alive for the past year and a half. I use Opera for the sites that I never really leave, just refresh every morning and evening. Many of the tabs have been open for the entire time.
But when I just want to pop into a site for a little while, like HN or something, I open Chrome. It feels so much faster even though it probably isn't in absolute terms. (Also, I operate one Twitter account from Opera and another from Chrome, so it's convenient to have two browsers anyway.)
I used to, because I loved the keyboard-only navigation (and Vimperator required me to hit number keys accurately, which is kind of awkward). Vimium on Chrome has left me only a few reasons to use Opera (mouse gestures, bookmark syncing), and they just aren't important enough.
I've used it since v5. I love it, but seem to think about switching every once in a while, but no one seems to have mouse gestures which can match Opera's. Also, I love the speed dial.
Opera was the most suited browser for my eeePC (1gb ram, Atom in ecomode most of the time). I originally planed to use Chrome as I thought it was lighter and faster, but quickly found out that Opera fared much better globally.
Beyond the numbers, Chrome seemed to perform worse as my number of tabs growed. I had freezes and the pages didn't scroll smoothly. I don't have such problems with Opera.
I have over a thousand of synchronized bookmarks, 4 email accounts set-up, in the end it just saves me a ton of ressources as I don't have to open anything else for my needs.
Chrome is perfect as the secondary browser who doesn't save sessions, the launch is blazing fast.
I used it from v 5 on, then moved to FF when Opera's lack of plugins and compatibility probs. killed it for me. Then, I went chrome > FF with vimperator > back to opera. Opera is the best keyboard-shortcut-driven experience ever. Try shift-arrows. With addons, it no-contest the best browser for me.
Spatial navigation is indeed great way to navigate with the keyboard. I wonder if anyone seriously uses Tab-based keyboard navigation?
There's more smart keyboard navigation in Opera:
• Cmd+Enter to log in on page which has autosaved login.
• Cmd+Backspace to delete last path component of the URL.
• Space at bottom of page clicks link with "Next" in the label.
• '/', text, Enter navigates link with given label (as opposed to '.' + text which searches page as you type).
• And (a rather quirky) '1' and '2' keys switching previous/next tab. It's much easier to reach with left hand than combos such as Cmd+} or Alt+Cmd+→ used in other applications.
I'm a big fan of Opera's attitude even though I only use them for testing.
Their upcoming OpenGL acceleration will really show how stupid Microsoft was for not making IE9 XP compatible under the claim that the OS was limiting them.
Only for testing and random surfing when I got too many tabs on Chrome and FF at the same time.
Chrome is still to deep in my heart... and it got it's place after kicking FF off there, so i think opera's nice interface will stay off for a while they still have some work to do to get a bigger piece.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadOpera's biggest problem is lack of support for -webkit-* properties, they only support unprefixed ones or -o-* ;)
Honestly, the engine is quite good. For Opera web standards support is a matter of life and death (they know they don't have market share to get sites being bug-compatible with them) and they put lots of effort into getting things right.
That's an rather misleading and ignorant thing to say.
Opera's Mac executable is 22MB, Chrome's is 57MB! (in their private frameworks, both i386-only)
Opera adjusts RAM usage proportionally to amount of RAM in the machine, so if you have several GB of RAM it might look large, but it scales down to 512MB machines. RAM usage is mostly DOM cache for fast Back button.
Functionality like Mail and RSS used to be in a 200KB DLL on Windows.
Regarding the desktop browser, I prefer to use open-source browsers, and (imho) Dragonfly isn’t as good as Firebug.
Main browser across Windows and Ubunutu (and OSX when I used that)
Having DragonFly - native DOM inspector, built in rather than external like FF is really very good. (In my experience some plugins seem to kill the perf of FF)
Continually recommend it to replace people's bundled mobile phone brower - well Opera Mobile.
Edit: OT, but it would be interesting to do this in the near future to compare and see how much bias there really is in this poll.
I really wish it had more marketshare so it would be better supported, but 95% of websites and features work without issue.
I use Opera, Chrome and Firefox equally. I use every other browser too for testing.
In Firefox it's as buried as you'd expect, but at least I never give up on it and use ssh/w3m to access private network sites.
It is easily the worst browser with respect to Canvas performance. It is almost always an order of magnitude slower than IE9, FF5, and Chrome 14.
I tried almost all browsers (except Safari) and the latest versions (>9) got me hooked. I like the screenshots inside the tabs (when you drag them down). It is looking clean, doing what I want, nice developer tools. I like it a lot!
I thought so too, until I added Math.floor(x) to positions in drawImage().
When you give fractional positions, Opera takes it literally and does rendering with costly anti-aliasing for subpixel precision.
Once I rounded the numbers, Opera turned out to be the fastest.
First let me note that on average using Math.floor(x) results in slower performance than using x | 0. I'd recommend using the latter way instead.
And even then Opera is an order of magnitude slower at flooring numbers compared to FF5, IE9 and Chrome 14:
http://jsperf.com/bit-thingies
Opera's drawImage is also an order of magnitude slower than Chrome 14, IE9 and FF5. Note that in this link the FF8Beta, Ipad, and the first two Chrome versions were ran by someone else's machine, so those results can't be compared with the other numbers.
http://jsperf.com/render-vs-prerender
If you don't believe them, of course, I urge you to run them for yourself.
I do run into an occasional problem with Opera, for example, in Google docs, you can't upload a document. But for me, bookmarks are very important (I have over 5 thousand of them) and chrome can't handle them correctly.
At work, IE8 is mandated (though I did manage to score Chromium recently and switch over).
At home, I've kept the same Opera session alive for the past year and a half. I use Opera for the sites that I never really leave, just refresh every morning and evening. Many of the tabs have been open for the entire time.
But when I just want to pop into a site for a little while, like HN or something, I open Chrome. It feels so much faster even though it probably isn't in absolute terms. (Also, I operate one Twitter account from Opera and another from Chrome, so it's convenient to have two browsers anyway.)
For instance, I use Opera for access to my company's Google Apps suite. And I use FF for personal. Chrome for social media for my job.
Beyond the numbers, Chrome seemed to perform worse as my number of tabs growed. I had freezes and the pages didn't scroll smoothly. I don't have such problems with Opera.
I have over a thousand of synchronized bookmarks, 4 email accounts set-up, in the end it just saves me a ton of ressources as I don't have to open anything else for my needs.
Chrome is perfect as the secondary browser who doesn't save sessions, the launch is blazing fast.
There's more smart keyboard navigation in Opera:
• Cmd+Enter to log in on page which has autosaved login.
• Cmd+Backspace to delete last path component of the URL.
• Space at bottom of page clicks link with "Next" in the label.
• '/', text, Enter navigates link with given label (as opposed to '.' + text which searches page as you type).
• And (a rather quirky) '1' and '2' keys switching previous/next tab. It's much easier to reach with left hand than combos such as Cmd+} or Alt+Cmd+→ used in other applications.
The last two have to be enabled in prefs.
Their upcoming OpenGL acceleration will really show how stupid Microsoft was for not making IE9 XP compatible under the claim that the OS was limiting them.