Opera Software Now Has 100 Million Users – Only 50% Are On Desktop
It seems that Opera loves to stay in the news. Now that they have taken a break from releasing new products at a breakneck pace, they are keeping themselves busy by drafting self-congratulatory press releases. The latest one celebrates the fact that Opera Software reached the milestone of having 100 million users in March.
Of course, this is not a surprising piece of news, since Opera Mini had amassed 50 million users in January 2010 itself. The desktop version was reported as having 45 million users back in December 2009.
As always, there are two ways of looking at these stats. The fact that Opera Mini has rocketed to 50 million users bodes well for Opera Software. However, its desktop browser continues to disappoint. Opera may have added 40 million active users since it went free, but its market share still pales in comparison to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. In fact, according to most analytic firms, Opera for desktop is still struggling to touch the 3% mark.
Opera 10.5 was undoubtedly an impressive release, but Chrome’s recent beta builds have once again highlighted the glaring omissions in Opera. In spite of being around for more than a decade, Opera still doesn’t have an intelligent form filler and the lack of an API means that others can’t build one either. Google has been incredibly smart about Chrome. Since they outset they have targeted key features and now their vision is paying rich dividends. Until Opera Software wakes up, it will continue to struggle to go mainstream.
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Author: Pallab De
Pallab De is a blogger from India who has a soft spot for anything techie. He loves trying out new software and spends most of his day breaking and fixing his PC. Pallab loves participating in the social web; he has been active in technology forums since he was a teenager and is an active user of both twitter (@indyan) and facebook .Pallab De has written 913 articles for us.
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How important would you say an intelligent form filler is? Also I think you have it in Opera, I filled in this and every place with a form I just chose the right entries for the form
I used the form-filler as an example because it is one feature which has been repeated multiple times on the myOpera forums over the years.
And no Opera still doesn't do intelligent form filling. It only fills in username/e-mail and password field.
Features don't matter. Marketing does. And Opera managed to reach 100 million users without help from Google's ad machine.
How does the desktop version disappoint? 50 million users in 4 years since the ads were removed, and without being promoted by Google's online ad monopoly or Microsoft's OS monopoly, is anything but disappointing.
Opera's market share doesn't pale in comparison with Firefox either. Last I heard, Firefox had 350 million users. Now Opera has more than 100 million users. That's nearly 1/3 the number of users Firefox has. Pales in comparison? I don't think so.
Don't kid yourself about Chrome. It's growing because of Google's online ad monopoly. It's impossible to not grow when you are being promoted all over the web, and on some of the web's biggest sites (like google.com and YouTube).
Firefox has close to 400 million users, while Opera has 50 million (I am talking only about desktop market share).
You are ignoring the fact that Firefox has managed to grow, in spite of not having the financial might of Google.
I maintain that Opera hasn't made much headway into the desktop segment in the last few years. This becomes even more apparent when you take into consideration that the total number of internet users has increased in the past few years. Opera's market share has increased by just about 1-1.5%.