OK. We just need to find the other 10.
Why do people get out of their way to use some marginal browser when there better both proprietary and open source options available?
Just to add to the web another slightly incompatible rendering engine? Or do they really like the gimmicky extras that Opera offers that much?
Gimmicky? Marginal? Not in the least. Sure, Opera, as a foreign, small, scrappy little software company wasn't able to knock off the behemoths of MSIE, Google/Chrome and Netscape-cum-Mozilla. But so what? The fact that they've been ahead of the feature curve as long as they have and are still in the fight is, to me, pretty dang amazing and quietly one of the most surprising stories in software in the last 15 years.
I've always been a fan of that resilient little Norwegian shop, and I'm sorry to see them (or, more than likely, their lawyers) get dragged into the unseemly world of lawsuits and recrimination. Hopefully this will resolve itself more amicably than it has started.
EDIT: I don't mean to be snarky or mean, but this bit made me SOL (snort out loud):
"..another slightly incompatible rendering engine?"
I find brand fidelity particularly nonsensical when a company is going downhill on the quality of its products.
Compared to Firefox, it actually makes decent use of RAM, doesn’t require fifty-five trillions of addons to work remotely properly (and hence doesn’t require updating of said fifty-five trillions of addons every other day) and a decent release cycle.
Oh, it also works on my phone and I just had to copy over wand.dat to get all my passwords there as well :-)
So? Do you still use Mosaic because it did first most of the important things Opera does now? How about sticking with IE, because it brought as AJAX first?
I never used IE. Because...IE.
Would you hypothetically not use a fast, super-compliant, feature-rich Mosaic out of an irrational bias?
This is simple: None are available (for me). They are (take your pick for your specific browser):
- Slow
- Memory-inefficient (i.e. they either use too much memory when I need it for other tasks or they use not enough when I don't need it and they could use it to provide a better experience, e.g. faster tab switching)
- Instable for my use case (50-100 tabs)
- Have no good mouse gestures (all the plugins for FF suck)
- ...For the most part Chrome or Fox or even IE10 behave similarly enough that I can almost use them instead of Opera. I think there's just 2 exceptions. Whenever I use another browser I find myself getting frustrated with 2 things: (1) Nothing happens when I "roll-left" over the mouse buttons (navigate back). (2) Tabs MORONICALLY cycle left-to-right, rather than in most recently used order. Both are show-stoppers for me, and I don't care if a plug-in can fix it, as long as Opera is otherwise more or less on par with the alternatives.
I have 16gb of ram on my pc, and regularly have >100 tabs open at any given time; I may be in a weird minority of some sort, but decent x64 support really makes my life a lot easier. I still load up Chrome and Firefox when I know I'm only going to be using them for a short/quick session, but as much as I like them, they just become awfully painful to use beyond that use case for me. Unfortunately, it seems Opera is following suit with the other vendors and is probably abandoning its x64 version, but at least they were the one vendor that pursued it enough to release something usable. Waterfox and the 'official' x64 builds of Firefox crash way too much for me to even consider. I understand the hell of trying to port to a 64-bit architecture when you're reliant on tons of old 32-bit libraries and such, but I really don't like this trend of staying overly complacent in the 32-bit realm when our hardware has been capable of more for a good while now...
When I'm on Linux however: Chromium all the way!
What is your apparently universal definition of "better," please?
For now it feels like a 'me too' product which simply exists in the market.
(Not to mention that Opera - the source tree and the product - is older than most of major browsers today, so technically others are the "me too" products...)
This. I started using Opera long before Chrome even existed. A basic thing: Hold the right-mouse button and click the left. It takes you back to the previous page. Chrome still doesn't do that.
It's the UI that I prefer, not the rendering engine.
The major reason that I use Opera is the built-in mail client. I have half a dozen email accounts and using multi-account login in Gmail is a bit of a pain. Having the email client built into the browser checks all my accounts for me (using IMAP) so I have one "Unread" tab open instead of 6 Gmail tabs.
Why do people go out of their way to use a marginal operating system when there are better both proprietary and open source options available? Just to add another completely incompatible platform for developers to target? Or do they really like the gimmicky extras (like genie-animated minimizations)?
(Note: Not making fun of the Mac, which I use everyday. Making for of the parent poster for his narrow-minded view point)
Integrated notes, integrated mail, clean interface. I've been using it since it was really early and while I can do similar things with other browsers I need a bunch of plugins to do so.
Automatic synchronisation of bookmarks and note across all my devices....
I use Chrome for flash and video because its architecture grants it a good bonus in responsiveness, but that comes at a high cost in memory consumption. I also consider it unsuitable for general use because it's so painfully unconfigurable. I can't even have a vertical tab bar, so I'm always left guessing what tab's what by their favicon and the first word of their title - a pretty major deal breaker for me.
I sometimes give Firefox a go, and while I find the range and power of its extensions very attractive, it somehow always fails to quite click for me. I'm sure I could get used to it, but while Opera's giving me much the same functionality in what I consider a nicer package, and with more provided out of the box, why go out of my way to switch? You might as well ask why I still use vim when emacs is clearly so much "better".
Not sure what other alternatives you'd have me use. IE? Safari? Neither are realistic options to consider for obvious reasons.
a.) a bookmark manager that doesn't suck (split view for life) b.) configuration dialogs that aren't boiled down to the utter newbie minimum, and a context menu that actually has a bunch of things in it c.) a GUI that's configurable like play-doh (even more so if you get into .ini files as well) d.) if that's your thing, there are skins available for it that seriously maximize screen estate
What are you calling gimmicky? And are all the CLI commands unix comes with gimmicks for you, too? Do you consider having more than one mouse button a gimmick as well? Heh.