Google Service Drops Support for Opera | Hacker News Reader

Google Service Drops Support for Opera

planetbotch.blogspot.no

130 pointstelemachos99 comments

This whole "supporting browsers" thing should be gone, and very soon. There are specifications that browser makers should follow, and if they are all supporting those specifications, then they well be well-supported.

The only differentiator between page rendering among browsers should really be speed.

(I believe Opera is actually one of the browsers that adheres most closely to the specs.)

LOL

Opera is the browser that adheres to the specifications most closely, and yet it is the least usable. Why? Because web developers don't test with it. Specs are irrelevant. Testing is relevant, and testing is caused by marketshare.

It is a chicken and egg case, right? Without support, no increase in market share, and no market share means, no support. Hence it is sad that a big player like Google does this, in an apparent act of getting more people on to Chrome. If Google does no evil, they will support ( we all know they can ) the most standards compliant browser.

Opera was at 4% last time I checked. Has that changed? If not, I find it hard to believe that's the motive.

It has. Their market share was at 2% at the beginning of this year, and has now fallen to 1.7%. It's falling month after month. There's no reason to expect their market share will increase any time soon.

Yeah, Google's reverse image search is unusable with Opera... unless you change the user agent string and tell Google you're using Firefox.

Then they whine about how Facebook and Apple are trying to destroy the open web.

Quick tip: On images.google.com, go to 'Quick preferences' (either F12 or right click on the page), hit 'Edit site preference', then set the user agent under the 'Network' tab.

I'm tempted to do this for all google related services, because they are such browser prudes.

You are saying "is". I am saying "should".

That would be lovely, but as long as IE is as far behind as they are (and at work we don't even run on less than ie 9, which is still horrible) and, crucially, don't force their users to only use the newest version. That will never happen. The web will be limited to what works in modern browsers, regardless of standards, and IE, 2-3 versions back.

Adhering to the specs used to be top priority, until the idea that actually making the Internet work got critical mass internally. The problem was that you don't get a lot of users if all you do is point the finger at the other browsers, you have to actually show the pages that people have created.

Now they even have features like Browserjs for automatically fixing web pages to work in Opera: http://www.opera.com/docs/browserjs/ You don't even need to upgrade Opera!

Quite clever. It's even open source: https://github.com/operasoftware/browserjs/

However, Opera scores 338+9 on html5test.com while Chrome gets 414+13.

> Opera scores 338+9

385+9 to be precise (and 400+9 for me).

> This whole "supporting browsers" thing should be gone, and very soon. There are specifications that browser makers should follow, and if they are all supporting those specifications, then they well be well-supported.

The problem is that those specifications have become so insanely complex that it has become impossible to either write them without any ambiguities or to implement them without any bugs.

Hell, most of those "specifications" wont be fully finished for years to come, and the implementations wont be feature complete for years either, and still, whole new specifications are huge sets of features keep being added all the time (WebGL, I'm looking at you, but there are more coming) before the existing ones can work well.

Worry given of all the browsers Opera has been the most standards compliant. No reason why Google can't support it as by supporting other browsers they supoprt Opera and with that if you change the browser ID then it just works - funny that.

I Have noticed that Facebook have been bashing google indirectly and directly and maybe Opera are deemed part of Facebook now for some reason and got dragged into this.

I have also noticed the google search landing page having below in effect adverts for there new products https://www.google.co.uk/ gives me the line below with link to buy a chromebook "From zero to online in seconds. Introducing the new Chromebook" - same results nomatter what browser I use.

Not sure if Facebook have purchased Opera and google got wind of it and acting all evil or if it is a gross oversight. Either way something smells.

They do have a rather loyal following and I've used it off and on since 2006 (when it was first free with no ads) and still think it has some advantages over other browsers. I also think their Opera Mini for mobile is the best mobile browser out there (it was the #1 mobile browser in 2011).

They have decent developer tools and have been early adopters of a lot of the HTML5 and CSS3 specs. I'm pretty sure they were first to make it possible to use HTML5 video and audio.

It just bums me out they can't seem to get more market share.

I'm not sure what you mean by the last sentence, but despite rumors, Facebook has not bought Opera. I highly doubt Google would punish Opera because they might be bought by Facebook.

I don't know about google but I "punished" them already when I heard they're looking to sell and the buyer might be facebook. I doubt it's just me.

Opera is not open source, they distribute only binaries. If the new buyer stuffs it with rubbish you don't want, there's nothing you can do about it other than switch. Might as well switch to chrome and learn to use chrome's developer tools when I'm not in the middle of something.

Of course, I will continue to test anything I make on Opera, it's just been dropped as my primary browser.

I didn't use Wave because it didn't work in Opera, and apparently I chose correctly.

My assumption is that the Blogger service is faced with cutting costs, and dropping non-mainstream browsers makes sense in that context. So, at the moment I see this as a negative indicator for Blogger, not for Opera.

Wake me when Gmail or Voice officially drops support.

google is frankly starting to enrage me, they are seeming to become more and more a company with only one obvious goal - own the internet. They have made some good products ( the chrome developer tools are great ), but I'm sick of them just blowing over anyone or anything that stands in their seeming quest towards a complete monopoly ( the google books settlement is a good example ). What happen to the good ol days where google at least seemed open and supportive of the internet, its community, and innovation?

Don't be evil eh? ;)

The Chrome Developer tools are almost entirely based on the open source Webkit Web Inspector.

Which was mostly developed by Google. They are the biggest contributor to open source WebKit these days, eclipsing even Apple.

"The reason I felt it important to pass on this news to non-Opera users is that I’m wondering if Google are going to stop at Opera? I get the sense that this could be the thin end of a wedge, and that Opera may not be the only browser which ends up getting the cold shoulder."

I doubt Google will give a cold shoulder to browsers with actual market share.

I'm glad Opera exists to keep a check on the other browser makers... I'm also glad Opera only has 1% market share so I can ignore it when I make own websites.

Agreed. I don't get why people like it so much. Something must be wrong with it to only have so few users -- it has been around for more than two years now, I think.

I'm not sure if this is a joke or not. Opera has been around for over fifteen years -- longer than Firefox, Safari, or Chrome. It's been around as long as Internet Explorer. But their main revenue source is mobile, where they have been the #1 browser vendor for a long time. Opera accounts for over 20% of mobile browser page views worldwide. The desktop market is less of a focus for Opera than for other vendors.

Even so, while Opera accounts for only about 1% of desktop browser page views in the US, it's about 4% of desktop page views in Europe, and much much higher within certain countries (around 9% in Poland and 20% in Russia, for example). Market share depends highly on geography, and it's much harder for a global company to ignore any of the major browsers.

Desktop map: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-201206-201206-...

Mobile map: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201206-...

I am still technically correct as 15 is more than 2.

But that still leaves the question, why hasn't it been picked up?

Because it's neither bundled with any operating system (like IE or Safari) nor can they afford to do a lot of advertising (like Chrome).

Firefox got popular because many sites advertised it as a 'better browser than IE' for free, I guess.

I tried to explain that above. Opera's revenue, and therefore their development and marketing and sales strategy, is primarily in the mobile market, where it has been "picked up" quite successfully. They haven't focused as much on competing for usage share in the desktop browser market. (And even so, 2% of all computer users in the world is not exactly a failure; it's a very large number!)

It's like a mirror image of Firefox , which focused almost exclusively (and successfully) on the desktop, but has not been picked up on mobile because it has not focused as much on development or strategy there.

Simple, back when the browser shake-up was going on (early 2000s) Opera was a paid browser, or a free browser with banner advertisements. It was also Windows only for a long time. I don't remember exactly when they came to their senses and admitted that no one pays for a web browser, but by that point it was too late.

Nothing is wrong with Opera. It's not missing any major features. In fact it is competitive with the major web browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers including HTML5 support, accessibility, security, and speed. Many of the features that other browsers need extensions for (like image blocking, tab management, or "new tab" pages) are installed by default.

Then why does it have so few users?

Browsers are a "winner take most" market because of website support and extensions. IE and chrome have rich parents, and firefox had much better extension community.

I doubt the extensions have much to do with it. Where Firefox had a vibrant community of people making extensions for their favourite website's search box, Opera added a way to access any site's search box from the address bar. This is just an example - a lot of things that Firefox extensions have been most used for are natively supported in Opera, though typically in a very different way.

I don't think anybody but a particular kind of power user like you or me would chose a browser for its extension community. I think the free firefox ads all over many websites helped more. I mean, at some point, the Dutch Linux user group collected money to pay for a full-page colour Firefox ad in the Netherlands' largest newspaper. From their own pockets! The holy war to promote Firefox was really going strong for quite a while, and only got stilled when the many of the same people decided to switch to Google Chrome because they discovered that speed was more important to them than that whole open source principle they financed that ad for, and that really the ad was against Microsoft / IE and not so much for Firefox.

This.

Opera has left a huge legacy of features that people take for granted nowadays: very low use of resources; using the URL box also as a search tool; editable search engines; tab and window sessions; savable sessions; more that I can't remember now. All these were invented at Opera and later picked up by the others.

Ten or fifteen years ago, Opera was the browser for hackers and the smart technologically-aware user. Then they sort of lost their way a bit. I switched away when Opera's resource use became as hungry as the others. Darn all these useless gimcracks and prettiness, I want speed, something I'm still saying today (which shows I'm as out-of-touch as ever I was).

A user base of 300,000,000 means they can't have less than 4.2% market share, even if the whole population of the earth were online.

I'm pretty sure that number includes opera mini / opera mobile users. I don't know what the numbers for opera desktop are but I'm certain they're a fraction of opera's mobile offerings.

Yup. According to Statcounter data from last month, Opera accounts for about 2% of desktop page views and 21% of mobile page views worldwide.

It's still a significant number overall and has large shares in some countries. From the Wiki:

As of December 2011 Opera has a 1.3% to 2.6% worldwide usage share of web browsers.[111]

The browser has been more successful in Eastern Europe, including about 47% market share in 2009 in Georgia, 43% in Ukraine, 39% in Kazakhstan, 36% in Russia, and 8–11% in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic.[112]

In July 2011, Opera broke its previous download records when Opera 11.50 was released and was recorded to be downloaded 35 million times during the first week of release

And I bet they count me triple, with Opera on the desktop, Opera Mini on my phone and Opera Mobile on my tablet.

Never believe the marketers, even when they work at awesome companies!

Go Opera! Go!

How would one buy a computer in East Europe?

You go to some PC shop (the vast majority of them were not in a chain of shops, just one guy selling PCs in one area and that's it). You barely had enough money for the machine so nobody was buying software. Anyway, the shop owner (a technical person) knew that it can't work unless he installs some OS. So Windows was installed for free. They could also install some other software for a small fee (the fee was for the work to install it and not for software), or you could buy CDs with software. When they installed software they would usually install the best there was (because anyway, nobody was paying for it so why not?). That meant best software in the category and the latest version of that software. For browsers that meant Opera.

How did you fix the PC?

You just get you technical friend to do it or the shop owner that sold you the PC. When these people would see that you still use IE they would (start to cry and) immediately install what they used: Opera.

So Opera adoption was driven by technical people installing, repairing PCs.

Why it's not so popular elsewhere?

Marketing. MS was telling you how to get on the internet in ads. Firefox was fighting a big monster in articles. I don't recall seeing either for Opera at the time.

As a long time Opera user, I have always seen Google treat Opera badly. When Google+ came, I didn't realise there was the notifications bar until I logged into Chrome. It never came on Opera.

Wow that's a very good point. I heard people talking about the bar but never saw it myself because I always use Opera. Ironically, they hurt themselves a little because G+ needs all the help it can.

As a long time Opera user, I like to say that I am proudly part of the 1%!

I don't use opera, but I guess I'm part of the other 1% in that I don't use any google services (outside of basic search).

"They’re not exactly forcing Blogger users who currently run Opera to migrate to Chrome, but they are making Opera untenable, and suggesting Chrome in its placev"

I have also had this feeling that Google is trying to monopolize the web. Hopefully this is only a misstep or my paranoia.

Chrome is very nice browser, but so is also Opera!

Is it routine for you to have `feelings` about Google, or what it's trying giZm0? We don't usually share feelings on in this forum.

"they are making Opera untenable"

I disagree. Opera's desktop marketshare is making Opera untenable. Even though Google is a major corporation, I doubt they can afford to spend the time fixing issues in a browser that gets lower single digit uses. Its not economically viable. No one will argue that Opera is a better browser than IE8, but IE8's marketshare dictates it should be supported.

Google is no more forcing users to use chrome than they are forcing them to use firefox or IE

> Even though Google is a major corporation, I doubt they can afford to spend the time fixing issues in a browser that gets lower single digit uses.

You're joking, I hope? Of course Google has the resources. It's one of the biggest companies in tech.

Not only does Google have the money to do it, but it really looks bad by not supporting Opera and telling people to use Chrome. Just to prevent that bad publicity it would be worth the money to just support Opera.

Furthermore, yes, Opera has low market share - a few percent globally. But it has very high market share in a few countries in Europe. Not supporting Opera is basically saying they don't support that country. Again, wouldn't it be worth the very small cost (in Google terms) to just support Opera?

Didn't Google give up on IE6 for some of their services when it had less than 20% market share? Opera has 1-2% market share. Granted, it should be a lot easier to tweak their code for Opera, but the difference in market share is pretty big, too.

Even MS wanted IE6 dead. In this case, it is all about Google trying to force a very good browser that has brought in great ideas and features, in addition to the performance and standards compliance, out of the market.

> Even MS wanted IE6 dead.

Exactly. So not supporting Opera like this sends the message that Google wants Opera dead.

>Granted, it should be a lot easier to tweak their code for Opera

In fact, most things would just work in Opera as they do in the other browser if there weren't any Opera-specific sniffing code in place locking Opera out.

If that's literally true then isn't this not really a problem? Opera has a user agent switcher built in, no?

I think it was less the market share than the incredible pain that supporting IE6 had become.

While Google has the resources to support Opera, it's not financially prudent to dedicate them to support a browser that barely has any market share.

> While Google has the resources to support Opera, it's not financially prudent to dedicate them to support a browser that barely has any market share.

Really? How much do you think it costs to make Blogger work on Opera?

Including testing, support, development, translation into various languages, overhead, meetings when fixes conflicts?

I would shoot at an average of 100k per feature. Plus more in the future to keep the support when they add new features.

What do you call a "feature"? How many features does Blogger have in your definition?

What would need translating for code improvements? They're forcing themselves to do more translating by showing a "not supported" message.

Considering that Opera is religiously standards compliant, anything that renders properly on Chrome should also render properly on Opera. (Assuming Google isn't invoking some kind of undocumented chrome-specific functions we don't know about for some reason).

They can 'drop support', okay, fine, it's their choice what browsers they target. I just hope they don't start sniffing for the user agent and actively blocking it.

>You're joking, I hope?

No. No im not.

>Of course Google has the resources. It's one of the biggest companies in tech.

I didn't say they lacked the resources, I said it wouldn't be fiscally prudent. They are not purposively preventing opera from working, they are just not fixing bugs that only show up in Opera.

>But it has very high market share in a few countries in Europe. Not supporting Opera is basically saying they don't support that country.

I call bananas. That is like saying they should support IE 6 because its popular in Korea and China, and unlike IE in Korea, there is not something stopping most users in that country from using something other than Opera (including firefox, and IE). Besides, it doesn't matter if 100% of a country uses Opera if that 100% represents less than 1% of their marketshare.

You are asking me if it is worth it, and I think they are basically telling you no, no it isn't.

How much - in actual dollars - do you think it costs them to support Opera, the most standards-compliant browser of them all?

If you're the only one that adheres to a standard, then there might as well not be a standard.

Not a clue. However every minute spent fixing an issue for a browser with 1% or less usage is a minute not spent making it better for the 99%

Even 1% being tens of millions of users, and when there is a clear conflict of interest here (Google having a product competing with Opera), and the relatively very small amount of work needed to make it work on Opera - not to mention the bad publicity here?

If 1% ~= 10 million then that means their user base is nearly 1 billion, which clearly isn't true. There are not 1 billion people with a blogger blog.

There is no conflict of interest. They are not severing opera completely. just off of one section of one part of one of their services - one that is probably one of the lesser used ones at that.

Not to mention, they are not going to make it not work in Opera, they are just not going to fix opera specific bugs. that means that if they stick to the standards like they normally do, then this really shouldn't be that big of a problem, outside of esthetics.

I think this is the sum total of bad publicity. Honestly, Opera's biggest issue has been a lack of advocacy.

Their mobile browser accounts for 20%+ of all mobile traffic, which together with their desktop browser usage is about 300,000,000 active users (that's the population of the entire United States). So it would make sense for Google to support them.

Mobile Opera is a completely different browser and not relevant to the Blogger admin issue at all.

Opera Mobile uses the very same Presto rendering engine as the desktop version.

I love Opera; it's incredibly fast (until the past few years Opera was king of the JavaScript speed) and very standards compliant. I hope this doesn't become a trend.

As long as it's standards compliant, it shouldn't be too bad of an experience.

You can support all the standards you want but it won't help you if the server sends you a gimped page because your user agent string doesn't contain "Webkit."

I started using Opera in the days when its free version was supported by adware (I actually purchased a license). It was always a technical innovator, so the question of why it failed to garner market share is a good one. The answer, of course, is that technical superiority is never a prerequisite for commercial success. Marketing trumps engineering every time.

Philosophically, I'd like every web page/app/widget/etc to be browser agnostic, and deliver an A-Grade user experience; but this is getting blown out of proportion.

1. Blogger ditching support for Opera, means the population that uses Opera to administer a Blogger blog is affected. Of all Opera users, how many administer a Blogger blog?

2. Browsers are just applications. Doesn't mean you have to do everything in one browser. Administer your Blogger blog in not-Opera; use Opera to consume your favorite web cotent.

Easy solution? Download another browser. If it upsets you that much, move your blog to another platform.

Google is pushing all other browsers out of their way. How is this not evil?

Opera walks on to a site. And Google says: We dont serve your kind here.

>I get the sense that this could be the thin end of a wedge

sigh

Can Google do nothing without invoking the "evil slippery slope"?

I see a lot of posts here make fun of opera.

Just a gentle reminder: they are the ones that invented tabs among other things.

your comment got me curious. It looks like opera was not the one "that invented tabs" after all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(GUI)

Browser tabs.

>in 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser.

Opera at least had MDI then, though I don't know the exact timeline of making that more convenient.

and XMLHttpRequest came from IE. Do you see where I'm going here?

"Four years later, in 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser... These were followed by a number of others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000"

I really want to like opera....it tends to be a memory hog (at least for me) and it tries to do too many things. In any case, if they open sourced the software it might see more adoption.

Opera does not take a lot of dev work at all. I do like some of the dev tools (unlike firefox - excluding firebug).

I could never get opera to work properly on Google Apps. Lets be honest, it's not like google made an effort to begin with.

I just find this kind of odd. It's kinda like when Microsoft thought it was too hard to support Firefox on msn.com. Look how that turned out.

I think you are confusing Firefox with Opera:

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1032-1008869.html

http://people.opera.com/howcome/2003/2/msn/

Browser war upcoming. Facebook recently added Chrome to their list of unsupported browsers (http://www.zurb.com/article/991/facebooks-unsupported-browse...) and this is obviously a counter-attack from Google. Google seem to be pretty sure that Facebook will in fact buy Opera.

Opera should turn the tables and add "webkit" to their user agent string.

Don't just back down Google because they have clout.

Opera has user-agent switching built in. You can just masquerade as Chrome.

Opera owns fastmail.fm. fastmail.fm could be seen as competition to Gmail. Related?

I would think Fastmail is fairly insignificant to the Google thinking. My guess is they are most interested in the mobile presence, especially as Opera are moving further into advertising. Also they would probably like to see them generally weakened so a competitor can't use them as a entry point such as Facebook recently attempting to purchase Opera.

When I do web development, I test in Opera at the very end after I have fixed all issues in IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari and guess what?

I never had to make one tweak for Opera. Ever. Opera has almost a religious focus on coding to standards. While I bet there are specific issues with implementation, whatever happened to the concept of coding to the standard and let browsers do their work?

Do Blogger features really need HTML5 WebGL 2.0 or something? I can understand some layout issues and willing to excuse them, but to not support them functionality wise is really sad, especially when you're the biggest web property on the internet. This is a throwback to the days of "Best works in IE(TM)".

To add insult to injury, I sometimes get messages like "Need a faster browser, Get Chrome" on Gmail.

Hmm. Opera didn't support CSS 3D Transforms last time I checked. Maybe that's changed, but it's disappointing nonetheless.

Why would something like the administration pages for Google Blogger need CSS 3D transforms?

They wouldn't, this is a personal gripe.

(although I guess they might use it for transitions?)

Nah, just the low market share.

And personal gripe.

> This is a throwback to the days of "Best works in IE(TM)".

Exactly, it seems that a whole new generation of web developers have forgotten history.

Is sad that when we thought we had left behind those awful times, and that we had learned the lesson, we have Google kicking us back to the dark ages of the web.

If standards are worth anything, all browsers that follow them should be supported equally.

The c't had a good opening "story" about this a couple months back. I, for one, will keep using firefox even if chrome is tempting, because I haven't forgotten what happened the last time someone got a monopoly on the browser market: The stiflement of web evolution for a decade.

And make no mistake, IE6 was revolutionary at it's time too.

Google is abusing it's monopoly on search and other things to convert people to chrome. Good, in many ways (if you visit google with an old IE, it displays a chrome ad). But now that I think about it, I'd rather have to bear IE for a year or two than give google the power over what becomes part of the web and what doesn't. Anyone remember flash?

It's been this way for a long time. Opera is such a fantastic browser, it's a shame to see giants like Google turn their backs to it for whatever reason.

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