Opera Mini now more popular than Mozilla browser, statistics show
Published June 7th, 2007 1:06 PM EDT By Daniel Goldman
Yesterday I blogged about the continued surge in popularity of Opera Mini and its penetration into the desktop browser market share. But I failed to notice the bigger story, until it was mentioned on one of the internal company mailing lists.
Opera Mini is now more used than the Mozilla browser, according to the HitsLink/NetApplications (see chart). In the month of May Opera Mini had 0.16% of the total browser market share, while Mozilla had only 0.15%.
Now granted Mozilla is not used much nowadays, it’s been taken over by Firefox. However, what was once a popular browser choice with a semi-respectable market share is now being beaten by the tiny Opera Mini mobile browser.
Having followed the developments of Opera Mini from when it was first announced this represents a monumental milestone. Especially since it has been only about 15 months since Opera Mini was launched globally.
As most of you already know, the Opera Mini team will soon be releasing a new beta of the browser. I’ve been testing it for some time already; hopefully you’ll be able to so soon too.
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So mobile browsing is more popular than open source? That is indeed an impressing result by Opera.
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Only if you ignore the 14.54% on Firefox.
The Mozilla browser, or more precisely the Mozilla Suite, is a different application. It was originally an open-source testbed for Netscape, but when Netscape ripped out its major selling points (like pop-up blocking), and issued buggy, unstable releases, Mozilla proved to be more stable, more useful, and ultimately more popular than the supposed end-user product.
Eventually a group split off the code to build what became Firefox, and of course that has become far more popular than the suite. Most users of the Mozilla suite have switched to Firefox, though some have switched to Opera and other browsers, and some continue to use SeaMonkey (which is essentially the same project renamed).
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I meant to add, this is still an impressive milestone for Opera Mini. It reminds me of the time a few years ago that I first noticed that Safari had overtaken IE for Mac.
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Just curious if you register Mini use yourself…
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Hey… that’s a comparison of apple and orange… Mozilla Suite is a for mobile surfing.
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Typo, I mean “Mozilla Suite is NOT for mobile surfing”
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To be honest with you, I can’t see any reason why this is significant. It probably makes a nice headline, but it really doesn’t mean anything. Mozilla Firefox is the real competition; Mozilla browser as a product is dead, so it kind of makes sense that the very much alive Opera Mini browser exceeds Mozilla usage.
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It’s of historical interest, at least. You can probably find some old articles on MozillaZine about Firefox overtaking Mozilla or Netscape. And I was seriously shocked when I saw Safari overtake Opera.
These days, I see more traffic from Opera than from Netscape (though I suspect AWStats lumps Opera Mini into the Opera stats, since I don’t see it listed separately).
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minghong, the point is that a mobile browser has overtaken Mozilla. It’s a nice milestone and bodes well for Opera Mini’s future.