Post passes on Opera over widgets
Published July 30th, 2006 10:30 AM EDT By Dan YurmanThe Washington Post has not been kind to the Opera browser. Technology columnist Rob Pegoraro has sniffed politely at the product, figuratively speaking, and turned up his nose. He’s an advocate for Firefox.
Now comes this review in the Post which is a more realistic assessment. It discusses the wholesale copying of Opera’s key features by the competition. It points out Opera’s advanced capabilities, but questions the viability of a strategy based on technology differentiation. Since the history of the Internet is one of innovation, this seems odd.
It is remarkable that the reporter manages to spend an entire column in a review of the features of the desktop product and never once manages to comment on the firm’s success with the browser on mobile devices. Even more interesting, well sort of, is his skepticism that Opera’s widgets are too cutting edge for the mainstream market. Perhaps he hasn’t visited Yahoo or Google lately.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/29/AR2006072900038.html
A Closer Look
Opera Browser, Still Perfecting Its Pitch
By Michael Tedeschi
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, July 30, 2006; Page F07
[full text at cited URL]
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I think his article is pretty fair all around.
He sets the mood perfectly with:
..and in addition to your widget comment (which is arguable.. how mainstream has yahoo managed to get widgets?), I really don’t see any noses being turned up here. It seems the article has one or two points against opera (widgets, and marketshare), both are valid critcisms.
The majority of article favors Opera. What I thought was strange was that the OperaWatch article here only has two (and a half) sentences conveying the spirit of the arcticle.
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I think by now most Opera users has learned to ignore the The Washington Post. They have always tried their best to bash opera.
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An insignificant newspaper, and a wannabe journalist.
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That’s awesome news.
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“An insignificant newspaper, and a wannabe journalist.”
And what would he have been if he’d praised Opera?
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That’s why I don’t read/watch/etc the news. They’ve lost the ability to bring you anything but opinion.
If I had capital, I’d start my own news company. But as I’m lacking capital in a major way, it’s probably out of the question.
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Something that was not mentioned in the article that I think is a big contributer to Opera’s limited consumer acceptance was its former days as a pay browser, where the free version was ad-supported. People like their Internet, but features won’t correspond into paying money when IE’s installed by default. Now, Opera appears to be free, which is good - now, they have to do a big PR movement like Firefox did in order to get acceptance. It’s harder now that Firefox is the anti-IE, so Opera doesn’t have as much of a unique niche. But some of their advanced features may appeal to people, and from there, Opera must build itself. (Or let Firefox adopt their best features..)
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Oh - and on how you bash the Washington Post article for showing a lack of optimism on the future of widgets, at least for now - just three posts back, one of Opera Watch’s writers says a very similar thing…
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There are a lot of things Opera can do to overcome the legacy of being a pay for play browser. My ideas posted in March 2006 are here.
http://my.opera.com/djysrv/blog/show.dml/174552
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I don’t think he is unfair in what he says, indeed the motivation for switching browsers is not very clear cut these days, with browsers on the face of it achieving more or less feature parity.
That said i would criticize the review on not being very comprehensive. From my point of view what makes Opera supreme is not so much the big features but more the implementation of features, yea sure there are tabs, but for me its the subtleties of the UI, being able to lock tabs, being able to ‘close all’ or ‘close all but active’, being able to ‘paste and go’ and so on.
And I’m not so sure if these nuances are review friendly.
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I thought the article was quite flattering of Opera and very fair. I don’t see why you made a big deal about his comments about Widgets. I haven’t used one of them yet that I found useful enough that I can’t live without. He even went so far as to say they were more secure than ActiveX.
I think his article was a fair evaluation of Opera.
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Firefox’s advertising(powered by google), extentions and site compatibility are driving them. Hopefully with opera on so many devices the idea will catch on that opera is the way to go. People blame opera for all website problems, people blame the website if the samething happens in firefox/ie. I see the same old **** all the time. I think adding some well made extentions and a good avertising campaign will get opera some more users. Not many widgets don’t do anything that a webpage can’t do, i don’t find them very useful.
A hell of a lot of news/reviews is ******** because bribes are involved. For example it’s no suprise a magazine is going to give the best review to the product that gets advertised most in their mag.
However this journalist did get more things right than CNet, i don’t think he gets that the features are neatly hiden and the program does not feel “bloated”.
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David Naylor:
“An insignificant newspaper, and a wannabe journalist.”
And what would he have been if he’d praised Opera?
Asa’s favourite groupie looking for a flamewar yet again…
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I think the review’s biggest flaw is that it does not mention many of the most basic Opera features that may lure people away from IE or Firefox. These include a native RSS reader, mail program (M2), irc client, and site-specific preferences, to name a few. Neglecting to mention any of them simply doesn’t give the reader a well-rounded view of the Opera browser. I was also disappointed that he mentioned IE’s and Firefox’s support bases being larger. I have found the Opera boards teeming with helpful hints and users. I would also think it worth saying that when you upgrade Opera, you don’t have to worry about half a dozen extensions breaking, which leads into the fact that Opera is more stable than IE or FF.
Overall, the review sounds like it was written by a junior high student trying to dumb down the “tech speak” for his teacher. It really doesn’t even serve to whet the reader’s appetite; that is, I don’t see any IE user clammoring to try Opera after reading this.
It may not be a negative review, but I don’t find it particularly helpful, either.
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I didn’t think it was that bad an article, but — there’s always things we could wish should be mentioned.
Another review that may be enjoyable is this one from pcmag.com. Opera almost got picked as Editors’ Choice, but since he still is trying to get to the bottom of several error messages he encountered, that’s not to be. (Yet - but we should watch that space for updates…)
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“An insignificant newspaper, and a wannabe journalist.”
And what would he have been if he’d praised Opera?
Stupid question..
He would be a wannabe journalist (from an insignificant newspaper) who praised Opera.
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For those of who don’t listen to tech podcasts or never watched TechTV years back, you probably won’t understand this or agree, but I think Firefox’s success happened soley because of it’s constant and very strong promotion through former TechTV shows like the Screensavers and current podcasts like TWIT.
Look at TechTV personalities ability to effect the internet..they made podcasts popular, were the first to use Craigslist, de.icio.us, and since they were on such large platforms like internationaly broadcasted tv and radio, they reached alot of people.
While Opera may have attracted alot of users with the new features in recent releases, it was only because Jon was on This Week In Tech to promote Opera that they started getting more downloaders, as well as because of the articles submitted into digg (which was started by a former TechTV host)
Get the podcasting community on your side, and Opera, you will dominate the browser market.
http://aquaboxpc.com/beta
http://dandevaney.com