famrey

He isn't suggesting a way to browse the web without Opera.

He's suggesting a way to overcome design problems on a site.

Opera Mini browses the web. It's a browser.

That could be because Skyfire is, frankly, crap.

Maybe you should read the article, then?

Yes, because Opera Mini can run on faster phones, but most sold phones are still the cheap ones, and that isn't changing any time soon.

And with operators cutting down on data plans, limited bandwidth isn't going away any time soon either.

The problem is that most of the world is not going to be using these powerful phones, and in the parts of the world where you can use them, operators are already killing unlimited data plans.

You are living in a dream world if you think compression is going away any time soon.

You are wrong.

Opera will NOT strip out ads from pages.

What Opera will do is to let the owner of the page choose to serve ads to mobile browsers through Opera's ad network.

So any ads from Opera on a site will be because the owner of the site requested them.

"they hijack HTTPS sessions"

Trolling much? They aren't hijacking anything. Opera Mini is a thin client (which lets it run on just about any phone, including old and crappy ones), so they have no choice but to pass everything through the rendering engine on their servers.

What's wrong is that one feature gets one score, and another feature gets a much higher score. Scores are not based on the number of supported features, but on higher scores for certain features.

More than 1/3 of Opera's revenue is from the desktop browser. It's simply false to claim that it exists on the basis of mobile browsers (superb or not).

> I guess you have to credit Opera for sticking it out this long, years after they dropped off the radar of basically everybody.

I don't get it. They were never on the radar. They are now. They've got more than 140 million users.

> I keep hearing that their mobile browser is big, but it seems that nobody has ever visited any of my sites using it.

It has 1/4 of the mobile browser market, and mobile browsing is expected to be bigger than PCs in a couple of years (it's actually growing that fast).

By the way, claiming that Firefox is lean because it sets hard limits instead of adapting the memory usage dynamically is pretty silly...

A random number like that is pretty useless. Opera has dynamic handling of RAM, so if you have a lot of it, it will use more. If you have less, it will use less.

I'm guessing you have at least 1-2 GB RAM.

> Although Opera is positioned itself as standard compliant, it has many issues with javascript.

I would have to disagree. Some people keep claiming that, but they can never seem to provide any evidence that Opera has more problems than other browsers.

Why should people have to understand URLs? Do most people understand how the engine of a car works? No. They just want to get from A to B. Most people don't care.

Hiding query parameters hides yet another thing that's mostly unreadable anyway.

Comparing this to "young people don't understand words" is quite silly. Printed words are important. The message is important. And in fact, language is constantly being simplified, and has been simplified throughout history. Just like the address bar in Opera is now simplified.

Google can't even get Chrome to work on all their own services. How can you expect them to support Opera?

That site isn't very useful since it only reflects what the author thinks is important. It doesn't show actual standards compliance. He chooses tests and assigns scores according to his own priorities. So it's misleading to call it "html5test."

It's a good codec. But as you can see, the specification was clearly not finished. So On2 sold a codec package that wasn't very polished. Doesn't mean it wasn't worth the money. It just means that polish needs to be applied, and now that it's open, it will.

On2 does not have the resources of Google and the entire internet at their disposal. Even the x264 developer pointed out that the VP8 spec was clearly unfinished.

The opera.com entry addresses that update. Look at the WebM FAQ: They have a separate branch for possible improvements for inclusion on the main branch.

There was no way to give people time to figure it out. The acquisition needed to remain a secret until actually carried out, and once it was carried out, this was the only way to inform people.

Also, Opera Software has an excellent privacy track record, and is located in Norway, which has some of the world's strictest privacy laws.

No, Opera has a very clear focus. They are not only a browser company, but also provides browser related services. They make money off of those things. With this they can offer better email/messaging services to their business customers.

The founder hasn't been involved with the service for years. The people who actually ran the service are still running it, and will keep doing that as Opera employees.

Also: Opera doesn't just make browsers. Opera also makes all sorts of services for both users and b2b customers. The browser just ties it all together.

If you read Opera's statements, they are not going to change the service. It's going to keep running as it always has. They are just going to use the technology to build other stuff or something.