Why Should I Care About Opera?

Question

Firstly, I'm not against Opera. It just seems when I encounter cross browser issues, and do a little research, I always find "the fix", but then I see a comment crying foul that the cross browser solution I'm looking at doesn't work in Opera.

Should I care? With IE finally getting its act together with IE 9, Google's Chrome and other Safari like browsers coming along nicely, and Firefox rock stable as always is this an issue I need to worry about? Is it worth it to me to fool around until I get Opera working if it is time consuming? Is Opera really that innovative to where it's market share will shoot up past Safari, Firefox, IE, and Chrome?

My inclination at this point is to wait for Opera to catch up and leave my scripts that support the big 4 browsers as is. Sure debugging the scripts in Opera could help me learn something new. But sometimes I have bigger fist to fry. Opera will catch up or die. It might already have caught up, I know the release cycle is fairly quick now for Opera. So maybe the issues I see in the forums are null at this point.

Agree or disagree?

Bernie

Opera is the basis of most non-Android, non-iPhone mobile phone browsers. – Illyrian

Answer 1

I would think about my customers here and try to get stats about different markets.

In some regions Opera is the Top 3 browser & not too far behind IE and Firefox (for example, Russia) so you should care about Opera if you don't want to lose customers. In other regions like US Opera's share is almost non existent.

Knowitall

Answer 2

The answer is, it depends on your market research. If none of your users/platforms are likely to use Opera now, or in the future, then it doesn't matter. If your company has a larger group making the decisions of which browsers to support, and you are supporting Opera, then you have no choice.

On the other hand, if you are making the decisions, and you don't have much information on your markets, or existing statistics from your users, you could go with general research: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

For platform examples, Nintendo seems to strongly support Opera: http://www.opera.com/devices/

I understand that tech-heads sometimes (the gaming industry as an example) drive the market. They have a strong word-of-mouth representation, and can lead trends.

Speaking of word-of-mouth, angering your users is generally bad for business :)

In order to support strange browsers, many developers create libraries that includes quirk-modes, and simply call into those, instead of worrying about problems per-page. I am not a web developer, but I understand there are existing libraries that also do this.

This site also looks promising: http://www.quirksmode.org/

Illegitimacy

Answer 3

When you choose a browser as your main test platform, you make an implicit choice of a set of features and quirks. While developing you will habitually avoid those quirks (sometimes with risky or broken workarounds) and use those features (which may be vendor-specific or proprietary).

When testing in and caring about as many browsers as possible, you will be more aware of what features are standardised and reliable, you will learn where a workaround against A's quirks is risky and breaks B, and your code will generally improve. For me the best answer (beyond just "test in what your users use") is that better code today gives you better future compatibility. Perhaps testing with Opera today will identify a CSS snippet that would have caused problems in IE10?

(I would actually argue you should not work around bugs in minor browsers - if you're certain the bug is in the browser and not in your code, report the bug and leave it.)

Hwang

By the way, here's one example where testing in Opera uncovered a timing issue that might occur in other browsers, given certain network timings: #3594588 - one example of how cross-browser testing improves general robustness – Hwang

Answer 4

Also you should care about Opera if you care about mobile phone users. I develop C# and I noticed, that Opera renders websites the same way as mobile phone browsers (usually blackberry).. It's the same strict about xml, cdata, javascript syntax. When firefox, chrome and IE would render websites, Opera and mobile phones would find their own errors. Just an easy testing tool :)

Depot

Answer 5

Only reason I care is that it still has a market share and to ignore it alienates a percentage of users (no matter how small)

Semantic

I would agree with you 99% of the time, but sometimes there are opportunity cost that cancel this out. – Bernie

That would be only the cost of additional development work for Opera outweighs the cost of doing something else instead. This is fair comment but focus on the producer should be that of the consumer (lots of literature on consumer sovereignty). With a highly reputable product, the consumer should not need to the pitfalls of a product before purchaising. – Semantic

Answer 6

You shouldn’t care. Opera’s implementation is even worse than MSIE’s.

Consider, for example, their “Development Console”:

http://dev.opera.com/tools/

Here's the code they provide to load it (at the “Developer Console” button on that page):

function(){
  var ele=document.documentElement.appendChild(
    document.createElementNS('http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml',
                             'script')
    );
  ele.onload = function(){
    this.parentNode.removeChild(this);
  };
  ele.src='http://devfiles.myopera.com/tools/developer/8679/devConsole.js';
})()

Problem is, that link to the JavaScript source is broken and returns a 404:

http://devfiles.myopera.com/tools/developer/8679/devConsole.js

Do you really want to do web development based on a product from a company that can’t even manage their own web development (or website)?

Move along and be productive with browsers that people actually use.

Earthiness

Are you seriously complaining about a page from 2006 with a big disclaimer on top saying "Don't use these tools, they don't work anymore"?? – Sero

The top of the page says "Note that these tools are not to be confused with Opera Dragonfly, which is now superseding these tools." Perhaps the wording could be stronger, but the intention is to say "don't use these tools anymore, use Opera Dragonfly" – Hwang

You guys from Oslo have a right to some pride in Opera, but it’s simply not a major player. And that page indeed does reveal a certain degree of incompetence, besides the wording (which might result from a misunderstanding of the English “present progressive” verb tense). Consider that that’s the page that comes up when you Google for Opera console. Compare the wrong URL, dev.opera.com/tools, with what you are inferring is the correct URL, dev.opera.com/articles/view/introduction-to-opera-dragonfly. Sorry, but that’s not a strong indication of web design competence. – Earthiness