Opera tunes up to overtake Firefox
Opera is looking to mobilise its existing community of users in order to overtake Firefox as the number two browser on the desktop. Last week, Opera decided to give away an ad-free version of its browser for the first time. Jon von Tetzchner, chief exec of Opera Software, said that by removing the inclusion of banner ads from the free version of its browser the company had removed the biggest reason users might have for avoiding its software. The Norwegian software developer claims 2.4m downloads of the ad-free version of the browser since 20 September, when Opera made the big move. von Tetzchner disputes figures from web analytics firms which put Opera's browser market share down at around 2-3 per cent or lower while Firefox has a market share of around 8.8 per cent. These figures can be misleading because users can change Opera to present itself as Internet Explorer to gain access to sites that fail to follow web standards.
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6 Comments
They can have all the marketshare they want, as long as it comes from MSIE...
Comment by ADAXL at October 3, 2005 03:50 PM | PermalinkI was one of those people who d/led Opera the day it went free. I was one of those people who once went through Netscape's Preferences menu but is scared of Opera's. I was one of those people who deleted Opera as a result, just minutes later.
Comment by Tsee at October 3, 2005 06:03 PM | Permalink
> These figures can be misleading because users can change Opera to present itself as Internet Explorer
So can firefox users.
In fact Opera has no preset of an user-agent string that does not include "opera" -- and this is to be checked first by any serious monitoring script.
Besides, weren’t they all fussing about not identifying themselves as IE anymore from now on?
Surely the "because users can change Opera to present itself as Internet Explorer" argument is getting a bit old now. Yes, they can. So can Firefox users.
~Grauw
Comment by Laurens Holst at October 5, 2005 11:37 PM | Permalink
There is only one thing Opera needs to take over Firefox.
XUL
Wake me up when they implement XUL in Opera.