Opera 9 wins eWeek Labs Analyst’s Choice award
7 CommentsPublished June 30th, 2006 11:32 AM EDT By Daniel Goldman
eWeek award the Opera 9 browser with the eWeek Labs Analyst’s Choice award, saying “we found Opera 9 to be one of the best Web browsing tools we’ve used in a long time, which is why we are giving Opera 9 an eWeek Labs Analyst’s Choice award”.
eWeek’s lab director Jim Rapoza wrote a very positive review of Opera 9. Jim also recorded a podcast with eWeek’s Peter Coffee where he discussed the new Opera 9.
I spoke with Jim Rapoza about Opera 9, below is the transcript.
Daniel Goldman: How long ago did you start using Opera?
Jim Rapoza: It was quite a while ago. Late 1990’s I think. I’ve been reviewing browsers for eWeek/PC Week since the early 90’s when I did reviews of Mosaic and Spyglass.
Daniel Goldman: Have you been using the Opera browser as your main browser all this time?
Jim Rapoza: As a browser reviewer I try to regularly use all the browsers, so I rotate through a set of them on a regular basis and Opera has always been in that rotation.
Daniel Goldman: What do you like most about Opera 9 (and Opera in general)?
Jim Rapoza: As I said in my review, I really liked the function to add any search engine. I actually did call another Labs analyst over to look at it. I’ve been expecting to see that ease of adding any search engine for a long time and this was the first time I’d seen it done so well.
Daniel Goldman: Opera has been around for close to 11 years, and has been very innovative over that time, yet Opera hasn’t had much success with its market share. Why is that?
Jim Rapoza: I think in the early days it was the fact that you had to pay for it. And the move to the integrated advertising didn’t help much either.
Daniel Goldman: If you were to give Opera advice on how to grow its market share, what would it be?
Jim Rapoza: I’m not a marketing expert so I’m not sure there but it looks like they’re doing all the right things community-wise. On the technology side I think Opera 9 is a good step as its one of the cleanest implementations of Opera in a while. Some of the previous versions were a litle cluttered and complicated by default at launch and while they could be configured to be less so, I think that kind of complexity turned off some trial users.
Daniel Goldman: Where do you see Opera in 1-2 years from now?
Jim Rapoza: It’s a tough question but I think they can definitely see some good improvement in their market share. The browser runs great on multiple platforms and since IE 7 will only be for XP Sp2 and Vista, there will be some opportunity to gain ground with users who aren’t upgrading Windows.
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using
I only hope that in their attempts to grow their market share, Opera does not turn my beloved browser into a firefox clone. In that, no extensions system like ffx, widgets are enough.
Oh and one other thing having a feeds panel seperate from the mail panel is the best way to go, and incorporating the opera news panel into the feed panel would help clear up clutter.
And another thing, adopting a similar approach to displaying feeds as seen in IE7 would go the furthest in making oper even better. not only is it neater but far less clunky than the current implementation.
Such changes for version 9.1x would make it the perfect browser.
using
the term you are looking for is ‘river view’ and i believe it is very heavily wishlisted on the official forums
someone hinted on the official irc channels opera 10 would arrive with a completely rewritten mail&rss code that would easily support such changed.
while this could be a rumor, i’m happy nevertheless – i only wish it was tomorrow ^^
using
Do you have the link to the eWeek’s original review ?