Full-text blog feedOpera Now Free: Opera Fans - Start Spreading
As I was hoping a while back, Opera (the desktop version) has now become real freeware, without ads. This is truly great news for the web.
Now, hopefully, the Firefox and Opera communities can work united (sort-of, at least) towards the main target: to bring down the marketshare of that old, stinking, vile pile of a browser known as Internet Explorer.
Now, some may think
Oh, what does it matter, now that IE7 is just around the corner? Microsoft are working towards standards compliance now.
And here's why it matters: We still don't know if Microsoft's intentions with Internet Explorer 7 really are good. In fact, they most likely aren't – simply because they have no reason to. They do seem to be caring at the moment, but they did so about five years ago as well... It's merely an overgrown PR stunt. If we ever let Internet Explorer's market share grow as high as it was a year or two ago (~95%), I think we will find out the hard way that Microsoft's aim was, once again: domination and (most importantly) lock-in. 8-|
So, if we (i.e. us Firefox and Opera fans) make sure that our favourite browsers always have a healthy market share, of at least 10% each (and hopefully a lot more), I think we can keep this Internet thing moving. If we want to be able to use any CSS3 stuff before we die we had better give it our best try.
Labels: browsers, firefox, internet explorer, opera
5 Comment(s):
At 12:22 PM,
DH said…
Nice post, David. Good to here such uniting things from a Fx fan like you ;)
I really do not like Opera/Fx trolls in Asa's weblog either.
At 1:39 PM,
David Naylor said…
Thanks. I'm afraid I'm not very good at Russian, so I had some difficulty reading your blog... :-|
At 4:43 PM,
DH said…
It says about Opera 9, which features it is going to have and about free Opera. And some other personal stuff. Hopefully, my "about" is in English.
At 3:05 AM,
jer said…
I don't think the free(as in beer)-ification of Opera is going to make as much difference as people are expecting. Until they adopt a more committe based development model (and thus share their code), it is still not going to be quickly adopted by people.
This isn't necessarily because people care about open source software, but more because the interface is completely horrendous to gaze upon as a first time user. The user experience could definitely use some committee-ification to make it a bit more palatable to people other than existing Opera fanboys.
Not trying to dig on Opera, I'm sure it's a good browser. I just wouldn't know because it made my head hurt too much even figuring out how to do anything.
At 10:26 AM,
David Naylor said…
Yes. Well, to be honest - that's my experience too. (The bit about Opera not working the way you expect it.) But I try to not shout it out loud so as not to get bashed :)
I was about to say that it's maybe easier if you haven't already got used to the keyboard short-cuts of Firefox, but then I remembered that they're more or less identical to those in IE.
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