Noble aim but that doesn't work in the consumer world. I am pretty open-minded, so I am seriously trying to use Opera every 2 or 3 years. And each time I really start to enjoy using it but after one or two days I get horribly disappointed: a significant number of websites I like just doesn't work. Not just loss in function, they are completely unusuable, for instance I get a white page.
Last time I did this try is probably 2 years ago. Last time I observed this behaviour with another non-IE-browser: at least 5 years ago, probably more like 8.
There was a time when certain websites only worked with IE. Somehow Mozilla and friends adapted... but what happened to Opera? I cannot stop thinking that Opera somehow got stuck in the 90s. They are certainly innovative, they were the CSS pioneers, everybody copied tabs and other cool features.
But still... When your rendering is incompatible to the real world, nobody will use you. So I can only agree: smart move. Maybe this will make Opera a serious competitor in the Browser market again.
Anyway, I also agree, Opera still has a user base. I work on an in-house tool and we have users using Opera, so I test against it.
You're saying that's the fault of Opera when it's possibly the fault of lazy devs.
You used to (still have?) devs testing for Opera and then preventing users going any further. Users would spoof the agent id string. So then devs started doing more tests, and rejecting Opera.
(https://groups.google.com/group/alt.sysadmin.recovery/tree/b...)
Obviously it's "hobby devs" breaking the standards and Opera having low tolerance for that. As a matter of fact, a large part of the web's success is due to hobbyists. The hobbyists were only able to contribute to the success because it was and still is so easy. You don't have to be a HTML or JS guru to create a dynamic web page. On the other hand this allows for many devs that never even heard of HTML validators, JS linters etc.
I think it's good that most HTML/JS implementations are very fault tolerant. It's good and the decline of XHTML, XSLT and friends underlines that.
>You used to (still have?) devs testing for Opera and then preventing users going any further. Users would spoof the agent id string. So then devs started doing more tests, and rejecting Opera. >(https://groups.google.com/group/alt.sysadmin.recovery/tree/b...)
In 2003 Mozilla and friends had the same problem sometimes too.
Except that is not true. Opera has a high tolerance, probably much higher than any other browser (out of necessity). But that doesn't help much if you're being blocked or sites constantly find new bugs in other browsers they decide to work around and thereby breaking it in any browser that is not one of the top 3.
Either you agree that Opera implemented standards as strictly as possible (really the only way when you your own rendering engine with such a small market share) while aiming for compatibility at the same time (which is implemented by copying certain quirks--and O isn't the only one that does that--as well as having a large database of popular sites that are fixed with bits of custom JS), or you disagree that Opera aimed and successfully did implement web standards (which is provably false).
Saying "possibly" makes it sound like you don't really know. Did you consider, while typing that remark about the downvotes (bad form, and doesn't add anything to the discussion, except for polarizing it even more), that it might actually be caused by your self-admitted lack of knowledge on the subject?
Sure thing, those people may be "Opera devotees", because those are the people that know what they're talking about maybe?
You claim that top post was "not actually an anti-Opera comment". What about your remark that "They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about"? That was you baiting all of those European and Russian Opera users, that you may or may not have noticed are also here on HN. If you had said "the browser nobody in the US actually cares about" then yes, I could not have disagreed. But this general claim is a tad ignorant, the global 1.3% market share is not at all geographically evenly spread, and goes up to 47% in certain countries. That's a long shot from saying nobody cares about it.
(BTW I may be an Opera devotee--a little bit less than I was a few years ago though--but I'm not downvoting you)