I once tried to convince a medium-sized employer, someone who got significant traffic, to support Opera. They looked up the numbers and had 7 visitors who'd used Opera in the preceding month. They just couldn't justify the expense for such an insignificant percentage of traffic. I think that's going to be your problem everywhere.

The only reason to support Opera is personal good feelings toward Opera. The userbase is insignificant, Opera doesn't further any given political goal as they aren't open-source and they are several more-popular open-source browsers in the market that are tested against. So what's the point of supporting Opera other than just liking Opera and wanting it to be usable with your site? Not that there's anything wrong with that, but rarely is it a cost-efficient procedure.

As mentioned in the other comment, there's no reason to not support Opera. They've spent a significant amount of effort over the past few years to get the browser up to snuff and in most cases will work out of the box if you let it. The problem is that many developers simply exclude it, rather than seeing if it will work.

It's frustrating since I just recently switched to Opera and personally find that it performs great, it feels better to me than Chrome, and overall I really like it. The biggest issue I've experienced and the biggest hurdle Opera has is the wholesale exclusion many sites partake in, usually via a if(opera){ //don't support}, rather than feature testing.

I agree it's not cool to block out browsers like that. Is that what Grooveshark is doing? I didn't test it in Opera.

But then again, maybe they _did_ test it in Opera and saw it didn't work, but couldn't justify fixing it from a cost perspective. So, would you rather have the thing just be all broken or have a sign saying "This is broken in your browser, sorry"?

There is a warning popup displayed telling you that Opera is not officially supported, listing the browsers that are. You can still use the site using Opera, it's just a fair warning saying that Grooveshark as a company doesn't make any guarantees it will work as expected.

You want developers to support Opera because you... like it? As another commenter already said, if opera doesn't even equate to a 1% of your users, you'd be a fool to spend money trying to support a browser most of your users don't even use.

That being said, Opera is a nice browser and has gotten better and better with time. I of course encourage projects that can and should to support opera, but there are plenty of reasons not to support it and in most of those cases they're right not to do so.

We will support Opera, we just didn't have time to test it in Opera before release and didn't want to claim it worked without that.

I've tried it in Opera, and it's perfectly usable apart from some weird scrolling issues where you can scroll the whole site off the page, and sometimes Opera doesn't seem to want to redraw some items in the songlists without scrolling a bit.

Just click the "Let's take a chance" button when the browser compatibility lightbox opens and the site will let you in.

Fair enough, but the phrasing suggests your browser isn't modern enough, rather than Grooveshark hasn't been tested to support it, which can be somewhat frustrating to a user of the browser, which may in fact be modern and up to date.

Our copy writers don't always get the why's exactly correct for this stuff, so I apologize for them for making it seem like Opera isn't modern. In reality, our current temporary lack of support for Opera is entirely Internet Explorer's fault. It took all our available resources to get the site working reliably in IE there was none left for Opera. Which sucks because Opera is /fast/ and standards compliant...but it has very few users.

It doesn't quite sound like that's the intention here.

"We've tested the new Grooveshark in modern versions of Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

It looks like you aren't using one of these browsers."

I guess ask them, but to me that reads like "Recent versions of these browsers have been tested. You aren't using something we have tested on."

Good job, though, Grooveshark folk! I love the updates so far.

I love the update, but yeah please do support Opera. Also I feel really silly now for not renewing my subscription before the price bump. Stupid me.

Opera is the Amiga of web browsers.

You can't blame projects for not immediately supporting your specific browser. Most teams develop for the standards. If your browser doesn't conform to the standards that work for major browsers, then it's just harder on the developers.

Opera does conform to standards, it has for some time, sometimes better than the other browsers. For example, there's no need to prefix CSS3 attributes with -moz.

What is unfortunately happening is rather than testing to see if the site will work in Opera, developers just exclude it. They've made lots of progress over the past few years to get their browser up to snuff. I just recently switched to Opera after Chrome started lagging during the 1.6 update.

Chrome constantly runs tests against thousands of the most popular sites to make sure they render right.

It's not the developers' jobs to make their sites work with Opera (especially when it works in IE, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari). It is Opera's job to make sure they render sites comparably to other leading browsers.

If that means they rip out their rendering engine and replace it with Webkit, so be it.

You obviously have no idea about the lengths to which Opera goes to get sites working. Some quick references i) They actually fix bugs on popular websites on behalf of the developers: http://www.opera.com/docs/browserjs/ ii) They actually have a position called "Web Openers", whose sole objective is to reach out to web developers. iii) An idea about the kind of compatibility issues and bugs Opera has to deal with : http://my.opera.com/hallvors/blog iv) An anecdote demonstrating the lengths to which Opera goes to fix broken websites: http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/2009/11/05/the-lengths-to-go-t...

Go through them and let me know if you still believe that Opera doesn't try hard enough. The problem is that being standards complaint is harder than it soudns. A lot of the nitty gritties aren't explained in standards and diff browsers implement them in diff ways. While developers explicitely implement patches for Fx and IE, they generally ignore Opera. And that's why so many websites don't work in Opera.

I wonder if the same argument could be made 5 years ago, only replacing "Opera" with "Not-IE" and "WebKit" with "Trident" :)

Sorry but its the developers job to code correctly, so that the site will work properly in the standards compliant browsers (Chrome, Safari, FF and Opera).

Coding wrong and passing the problem to the browser is just mean

BTW, different rendering engines, assure no monopoly, innovation and competence, which is always good.

Okay well I didn't mean to insinuate that they don't conform to standards in general. But you can see that if the developers prioritize their time based on browser usage, Opera might be brushed aside at first.

Idealy, developers could target one set of standards and their product would be functional across all browsers that implement them. In general, the bigger browsers all act relatively the same (not IE) when standards-compliant code is used, so if what works for them doesn't in Opera, then that's a problem.

> For example, there's no need to prefix CSS3 attributes with -moz.

And that's wrong, css attributes whose drafts aren't final yet should not be labeled as such by Opera.

Prefixing attributes is the preferred W3C way to implement nonstandard attributes, which in my opinion is probably the right way to go, because it means there won't ever be a case where two attributes named the same mean totally different things, there will only be differences in implementation for a spec attribute.

There's more to support than standards. Curretly and in the past Opera has given more grief from the users' POV because of it's iffy rendering. Right now I push a few thousand elements into the page at runtime, this works perfectly fine everywhere else including IE6 yet Opera decides that it needs not redraw the whole page(or something) and when I scroll it causes ink smudges(?) it's rather entertaining to look at because it's as-if Opera thinks it's some kind of photo editor. Keeping the parent div hidden and then showing it after I've done pushing the elemements seems to work around that bug but I now have a visible lag everywhere. What do I do?

Ask here:http://dev.opera.com/forums/forum/3590 ?

Opera killed my puppy.