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Opera 8 Surpasses 2 Million Downloads

By Nate Mook, BetaNews

May 3, 2005, 11:43 AM

It may have a long way to go to meet Firefox's 50 million download mark, but Opera Software is touting the success of version 8 of its Opera Web browser, which has surpassed 2 million downloads since its launch two weeks ago. The number represents total downloads across all platforms and languages.

Although download numbers do not necessarily represent actual users, companies have increasingly begun to look to such tallies in order to gauge the success of a product launch. Microsoft has also used the amount of downloads to represent user adoption of Windows XP Service Pack 2.

Mozilla's Firefox browser became a media darling while boasting about skyrocketing download numbers. However, statistics gathered by research firms place Firefox's actual usage well below 10 percent, indicating same-user upgrades accounted for a share of the downloads.

Still, Opera is pleased with the result, saying version 8 was "welcomed by Internet users worldwide." The English language release accounted for 1.3 million downloads, while the German version was downloaded nearly 400,000 times, the company said.

"Considering Opera's last version, Opera 7, accumulated more than 60 million downloads, the successful launch of Opera 8 in April 2005 reflects that even higher download figures await for Opera," said Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner in a statement.

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By captainahab

posted May 4, 2005 - 3:32 AM

Small, stable, fast, feature-rich, secure. Opera 8 is a beauty.

Score: 0

By jshrk

posted May 3, 2005 - 5:56 PM

Amazing software well done

Score: 0

By PhoenixPath

posted May 3, 2005 - 4:18 PM

Haven't touched Opera since 6.0~ something or other.

I guess it might warrant a download. Should at least be somewhat useable, eh? What engine is this thing using, gecko, IE, or it's own?

Score: 0

By Mountain_Man

posted May 4, 2005 - 8:20 AM

Opera has awesome rendering engine. It can zoom and fit-to-width pages on the fly (fit to width is best for print, IMHO). Many people that work for Opera Software are co-authors of CSS standards and Opera is pioneering in implementation of many CSS elements.
Opera 8 adds support for non-standard extensions like wmode-Flash and ones that Google Maps and GMail use.

Note that Gecko supports bunch of non-standard and IE-specific stuff as well. In todays web not being IE isn't easy, so thats no wonder that other browsers implement IE extensions or have to pretend being IE to be let in to many websites.

Score: 0

By sophist_dreams

posted May 4, 2005 - 12:57 AM

I uses it's own engine.....but in order to visit a great number of web sites you have to fool it into thinking it is either IE 6.0 or Mozilla 5.0 by changing it's browser indentification in the netowrk settings. 2 million downloads, but how many of those did what I did, played with it a while then discarded it because it is even less industry html compliant than IE is?

Score: 0

By groanz

posted May 4, 2005 - 6:20 AM

"it is even less industry html compliant than IE is"

Now, this is an uninformed comment if I ever saw one... First of all, IE is what everyone designs for. It is impossible to be more "compliant" with IE than IE itself!

With that said, the problem isn't that Opera isn't compatible. The problem is that for some reason, lots of sites specifically detect Opera, and then send it broken code. If Opera had gotten the same code as everyone else, it would have worked just fine.

But people are discriminating against Opera for some reason.

Score: 0

By sophist_dreams

edited May 4, 2005 - 9:23 PM

"Now, this is an uninformed comment if I ever saw one... First of all, IE is what everyone designs for. It is impossible to be more "compliant" with IE than IE itself!"

This is absolutely untrue. The industry moved to an html coding and web page design standard that microspud refused to adopt. This is one of the main reasons that certain sites that are totally IE compliant dont render properly in FF (this is true of microspuds web sites by the way, try to download from their update web site in FF). IE is 5 years behind the power curve.

Score: 0

By groanz

posted May 6, 2005 - 5:02 AM

WAKE UP. Sites still use proprietary MSIE extensions like EMBED and MARQUEE. The reason it works in Firefox (and Opera) is that it has added support for IE's bugs and non-standard features. More examples: XMLHttpRequest, document.all...

You obviously don't know what you are talking about.

Score: 0

By RobertM

posted May 3, 2005 - 4:51 PM

I was an Opera user back in the 6.0 day, too. Then I swithced to Netscape when it got tabs, then to Mozilla to "debloatify," and last year to Firefox.

Opera uses its own rendering engine. It's nice, but it "pretends" to implement some IE-only things, which work sometimes and don't others. And it identifies itself as IE by default, which I always change (or at least I think 8.0 still does that). Both Gecko and Opera are great rendering engines, though I personally prefer Gecko. But the important thing is that it's not IE. :-)

Score: 0

By capandjudy

posted May 3, 2005 - 4:42 PM

Opera uses it own proprietary rendering engine that they call "Presto". It is a least worth a try.

Score: 0

By Prodder

posted May 5, 2005 - 3:38 AM

I agree... the Presto engine seriously outclasses the others IMO, above all else it just looks and works so much better. As does everything else about Opera, the features are streets ahead of everything else.

Score: 0

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