While Opera is arguably ahead of the curve in many areas I've always felt they lack the polish everyone else brings. Be it Safari's glossy SpeedDial or Chromes fancy tear-away tabs Opera has a great idea and then consistently falls short of the mark.
Worse the areas they didn't pioneer they still fall short. For example I go really excited about some of the parts of their extension API... until I read Chrome's API which is significantly more fleshed out.
I still can't tear myself away from Opera though. I just can't get used to the extension-based replacements for much of the native functionality, be it mouse gestures, the RSS reader, notes (oh gosh. notes.). It would be nice if, as David points out in his article, they focused more on polish than on new features. At the moment Opera feels a lot like "old" Google with a whole bunch of creative, yet half-baked, ideas.
"While Opera is arguably ahead of the curve in many areas I've always felt they lack the polish everyone else brings. Be it Safari's glossy SpeedDial or Chromes fancy tear-away tabs Opera has a great idea and then consistently falls short of the mark."
Do most users actually comparison shop browsers? Do they try out Opera, Chrome, and Safari and then decide they'd prefer one over the other because of some eye candy the others lack?
I'm sure some power users do, but I would bet that the average user just uses whatever's already installed at work, or whatever browser sounds like what they've heard other people talk about.
They don't have the time or interest to comparison shop (and probably wouldn't even know what to look for, or even that other browsers exist).
Someone in the office or wherever will switch people slowly. People do rely on the office geek to tell them whats best as they dont know, and that person probably does the preinstall or technical induction for new users...
Very insightful blog post, which is very much in tune with my opinion on Opera. It's rare for someone who worked at a company to have such good perspective.
It's definitely true that the main reason why Opera has struggled on the desktop is because of a lack of polish. The UI has always felt clunky, non-native and awkward.
That is a major reason why I switched from Opera to Firefox (née Phoenix) many years ago and haven't looked back since. UI has always been their weak link, while their performance and rendering engine has always been top-notch.
Having tried Opera 11.5 for the first time, it's certainly a huge leap forward. It's not perfect, but it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb like previous versions. The downside is that it's a bit too close to Firefox/Chrome to provide a compelling reason to switch, and it still has too much irrelevent crap front-and-centre coupled with its own UI quirks (e.g. why is "Show menu" in the "File" menu and not in 'View'?). Even so, a vast improvement.
I think it's far too easy to blame their low marketshare on their miniscule marketing budget. Mozilla faced similar problems. Mozilla failed when they had a crap product in SeaMonkey (née Mozilla Suite) and succeded when they had a compelling product in Firefox. If Opera can create a similarly compelling product, I have no doubt that many people would happily switch.
I think Opera's best approach would be to focus on Opera Mobile. Mobile is the browser growth market, I suspect it's easier to convince users to try a mobile browser than a desktop one, and they should be able to translate mobile marketshare into desktop marketshare.
"I think it's far too easy to blame their low marketshare on their miniscule marketing budget. Mozilla faced similar problems. Mozilla failed when they had a crap product in SeaMonkey (née Mozilla Suite) and succeded when they had a compelling product in Firefox."
This is an important point, but I'm not sure that it's clear exactly why Firefox was so "compelling".
I remember when Firefox first came out, it was billed as a "faster Mozilla". I gave it a try, because I'd found that the original Mozilla browser was bloated and slow, and I was hoping Firefox might live up to the hype. But, no. Firefox was just as slow and bloated as Mozilla. In fact, from an end-user's perspective, they seemed pretty identical, except for the name. Yet people jumped all over Firefox like it was the Second Coming.
Now, I understand that Firefox does have one great advantage over Opera, which is that it's open source, while Opera is closed source. But the original Mozilla browser was also open source, and it didn't get a fraction of the interest Firefox got. Another advantage was that Firefox had extensions, but (if I recall correctly) the original Mozilla browser had them too.
So, can Firefox's success over the original Mozilla browser be chalked up completely to the name change? Would Opera have been more successful had they simply rebranded it with a sexier name, or claimed that the "new" browser they'd released was a "faster Opera"?
I'd argue that the key difference in Firefox was the UI. It was slimmed down and tidied up, with all the unnecessary clutter removed.
Firefox also shamelessly copied and polished up the best features from Opera (i.e. tabs and integrated search), attracting many early adopter Opera users, plus the fact it was free rather than ad-supported gave the browser a wider audience than Opera ever could.
Changing the name, the theme and the unused Communicator bloat (Mail, Composer, Chatzilla) was more symbolic in distancing Mozilla from the negative associations of the mostly terrible Communicator than anything else.
Marketing is probably a major issue for Opera. I suggest Opera and people have never heard of it most of the time, or I get a response like, "I don't want a browser that has ads in it." Opera hasn't had ads in their browser for years now. They're basically the untrusted store brand of a commodity people already receive for free.
Another issue for Opera is that 'stability' fluctuates significantly with each release.* I'm talking about how some websites will stop functioning properly. I'll try upgrading to the beta. Sometimes the site I wanted to work will work, and then it's another site that stops working. I always have to use Opera as a complementary browser. Opera will find some new way to freeze or crash as a result of a certain webpage trying to load.
*(This can be attributed to poor web design, but it's just part of the reality of being the underdog that they should pay more attention to this.)
My "Go To" browser journey has taken me from Opera to Safari, Safari to Firefox, Firefox to Opera, Opera back to Firefox and now Firefox to Opera 11.5. Chrome is one browser that I'm not interested in making my Go To list for a number of reasons.
I'm becoming more happy with Dragonfly. I do wish that a color picker option existed outside of it though. I don't need or want widgets. Extensions for me are nice. Just a ruler and tweet button give me all that I need though - color picker would be nice.
I do believe that polishing the UI will help overall. I like the more minimalistic approach of 11.5 and the ability to fine tune so much (always an Opera feature). I think I will hang around Opera for awhile since I've added mini to iOS too and see how it can make life easier for me with the links syncing feature. However, there are many areas that would be certainly benefit from some UI and UE attention.
I think users are not interested in widgets and unite.
The newest opera unite application was realesed in may 2011 (http://unite.opera.com/application/722/) whereas there are new extensions everyday.
Of course, API is not updated (vide: http://www.opera.com/docs/apis/extensions/windowsandtabsguid...)
In my opinion, Opera focuses too much on creating new things instead of improving support, especially of google services (eg. G+)
We don't want Opera to stop innovating though. They seem (!) to have driven a lot of the innovations over the last decade that I've found useful.
FWIW I don't use Op on the desktop, primarily because I've become entrenched with FF since moving to it for web dev tools some time ago, but on phone and tablet I find Opera far better than other offerings.
Opera has always been wanting to do more with its product, and widgets and Unite are examples of this, not to mention the Opera Platform (a mobile phone UI implemented with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, that unfortunately never made it anywhere). Oh, and BitTorrent, which I just remembered, because you sure don't see it in the user interface anywhere.
You're not alone thinking Opera has focused too much on creating new things ... internally people have also been thinking and saying this. I remember people complained regularly about Opera crashing when I worked there, although I personally have never had much problems with stability.
The lack of polish on the desktop version could also be because they have been putting a lot more resources on the mobile version ... after all, they bring in a lot more money. Opera is also a lot more successful in the mobile market, as the original article mentions. Opera Mobile is a great product, and Opera Mini is just amazing.
Do you think if it is possible that Opera could do some cleanup of its product lines? There were some successful things, such as Opera Mail client. But there is a lot of unused gadgets.
It would be great if Opera had some statistics about usage of specific features. I personally don't know anyone using bittorent, widgets, unite.
(I'm from Poland, Opera is quite popular here)
There was a project on collecting usage statistics, but I don't know what the current status is, or how the data was used. I doubt the features you mention will disappear anytime soon, that would probably be seen as a little too drastic.
Opera probably still wants to push the browser as a platform, especially on devices (http://www.opera.com/business/devices/), and widgets and Unite are important for this.
Opera should do an OS like Chrome OS. Opera Unite will work well on such OS and they will also start making direct contact with hardware manufactures which will bring more polish to the browser.
Sometimes a company gets so focused on innovation that the developers are put on an "innovation-drip" to the exclusion of service. A symptom of this is when, in the name of innovation, a hundred open bug tickets are ignored because they relate to short-term issues rather than visionary strategic plans. Yet true visionaries are short-sighted in nature, they see one day at a time and they fix whatever is at hand to be fixed.
Opera is one of the few applications that I am consistently happy with - and I don't limit my comparison to just other browsers. But I don't like the comparative dialog in general, so here's a few things that impress me:
-- Having the panel toggle set to the left edge of the screen is absolutely perfect. If I were to transplant one feature from Opera to Eclipse, for instance, that would be it.
-- Also, being able to set the tab cycle order (for alt-tab and when closing) is indispensable. Having to cycle in tab-bar order feels downright archaic.
-- The little features, like having notes sync between machines via opera link and integrated bit torrent, are similarly difficult to imagine going without.
This makes some fair points, but I think this also suffers from some of the general disconnect between techies and the general web browsing populace (who probably provide the largest fraction of ad clicks, by the by).
After watching some non-technical people browse the web, I think all modern browsers are pretty much equivalent (as far as the user is concerned). Normal users don't install extensions, they don't care about easy bookmark access or browser speed (as long as the difference isn't in the order of magnitudes) or really any of the things that browsers might do differently. It's just slightly different window dressing around websites. So I think cleaning up the Opera user interface as the article mentions, while nice, won't make a difference to user numbers.
When products are effectively the same, marketing is the ONLY thing that matters (bundling aside).
Now having said all that, there is of course a big difference amongst web browser when it comes to power users and as a long time Opera user, I find that it enables me to browse the web in ways that are not possible in Firefox and Chrome.
1. Good defaults (in terms of functionality and settings). I can install Opera on a new computer, connect to Opera Link to import bookmarks / searches, change three settings and I have my complete web browsing experience set up on another computer. I don't have to install ANY extensions, widgets or what have you.
2. The reason that I don't need extension is partially because some functionality is already included in the browser, and partially because the address bar in conjunction with bookmark aliases replaces a ton of extensions I might need to have and acts in many ways like a command line to the web. Bookmark aliases let you specify some "command" that you type in in the address bar that invokes a bookmark. So I can type "hn" into the address bar, hit enter and it will take me to hacker news. In addition to that, the address bar consumes javascript. That means that you can set aliases for bookmarklets and for multi argument quick searches. So if I type "bm" (for bookmark) into the address bar, it will open the window to bookmark something on delicious. The same thing that would happen if you click on a delicious bookmarklet button... only you don't have to click on a button. And it will get synced when you set up Opera Link on a new install. And you can hook up any old snippet of javascript you can think of to such a command.
3. Find on page acts as an element selector. If you see a link on a page that you want to click on, you can do "Ctrl + F -> type in part of link name -> enter" to "click" on the link. I know that FF has extensions (vimperator?) to do something similar, but again... that's one less extension you need.
In short, with a very small combination of extra features, Opera will save you a million mouse clicks with zero setup / configuration hassle.
Anyway, the only extension I've ever really wanted for Opera, is Firebug. The lack of a good debugging tool has long been a good drawback, and even though Opera now has Dragonfly, it still doesn't feel as good as Firebug.
About 2: this sounds like what Firefox calls bookmark keywords (keywords have a feature beyond just being a textual shortcut to a bookmark: they can take an argument if you include %s in the bookmark they point to [Firefox calls these keyword searches, since obviously it's mostly used for search engines]). I used to use them a lot, but now just rely on instant history and bookmark search.
2: Don't really need it. When I type "h" into the address bar, Hacker News is the first guess. Similarly for other sites I frequent.
3: Firefox has done that (with no extensions) for as long as I can remember; it even goes a step further: you can search only links. Chrome also does this.
Yeah, and I know that for every feature someone cites for why they like Vim, someone will point out how the same thing can be accomplished in Emacs (and vice versa). But it's often just superficially equivalent, as is (part of) this list.
1. Last time I tried that, it didn't sync extensions, extension settings, or bookmarklet buttons (or other settings). Unless they started doing that now (and judging by https://services.mozilla.com/ it seems like they don't), it'd still be much more of a hassle to set up a new FF install to be equivalent.
2. This only addresses a quarter of the point I was making and even for that... I don't like semantic search because you have to scan the suggested result to check that the first search result is in fact whatever you expected it to be. When I type "hn" and press enter, I don't have to wait for semantic search to do its thing, I don't have to make sure that some other site that starts with "h" or has an "h" in the name took the top result spot (and what if you have multiple pages you visit often that start with "h"?), I KNOW it will take me directly where I want to go. I can do Ctrl + T -> hn -> Enter in a fraction of a fraction of a second, while reading something else on another monitor.
3. Hah, I did actually try it out in FF before writing that part of the comment. Of course, you first have to enable it in preferences (and it was disabled in my preferences for some reason, though judging by the documentation that's not the default). Anyway, thanks for pointing this out. :)
Anyway, it's the combination and integration of little things that makes a big difference, not the little things themselves that might be replicated in some way in the other browsers minus the synergy. I know this is probably not obvious until you have really tried it yourself and the reflex reaction is to squint a lot and go: "My browser can do something very much like that, too!" or "It don't need THAT! It wouldn't make a difference."
I've tried Opera a couple of times but keep coming back to Firefox. Firefox has a much larger extensions library; the UI is more intuitive IMO (I found it a pain to bookmark with Opera. For some reason, Opera seemed to render better-looking pages but there was nothing there that justified switching over from Firefox.
I remember a while back I was doing some browser testing in Opera and images resized in CSS were completely destroyed. This was probably two years ago. It seems that they have since sorted that out, but that alone turned me off enough to go to Chrome and never look back.
Worse the areas they didn't pioneer they still fall short. For example I go really excited about some of the parts of their extension API... until I read Chrome's API which is significantly more fleshed out.
I still can't tear myself away from Opera though. I just can't get used to the extension-based replacements for much of the native functionality, be it mouse gestures, the RSS reader, notes (oh gosh. notes.). It would be nice if, as David points out in his article, they focused more on polish than on new features. At the moment Opera feels a lot like "old" Google with a whole bunch of creative, yet half-baked, ideas.