Ignoring the fact you sidestepped like half of my post with silly namecalling, I suppose my retort to the thing about Opera Mobile would be that it seems like many of the advances made with Opera’s renderer in the past few years relate to mobile browsing - SSR being the major one, but widgets and sync too. And of course the obsessive drive to make it faster, which is relevant and useful in the mobile space but completely irrelevant to the goal of expanding their marketshare on the desktop. From my perspective that shows a compay-wide bias towards Opera Mobile, but if the consensus is that Opera Mobile is moving sluggishly too, I guess it doesn’t hurt my case to suppose that Opera Software has become lazy and entirely confused as opposed to skilled but mobile-obsessed.

Anyway, you’re welcome to return to my previous post that addressed what you said. I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong - in fact I could be, if Opera 10 turns out to be revolutionary and great. But I think I’m pretty familiar with what Opera has actually released in the past few years, and it lines up with my argument logically.

“hasn’t gone anywhere significant in years”

…according to you.

“I thought the plan was to take a hit on the browser front so as to get Opera’s name out there.”

Shows how much you actually know, I guess.

“Such increases of the desktop team’s size are irrelevant, though, if they continue to focus on things like further standards support, small screen rendering, and widgets, because these features to me”

The key words being “to me”. Yes, we know, you are the center of the universe…

“My guess is that if the desktop team has expanded, the reason their product isn’t as exciting as it once was is because they’re doing a lot of the development of Opera’s fundamentals that the Mobile, Wii, etc teams base their work upon.”

No, that would be the people working on the rendering engine. Not the desktop people.

“Opera desktop has not really progressed in the places it should do”

According to the person who thinks the universe revolves around him…

“all of the exciting development work coming out of Opera is on the mobile front”

That’s funny, because in the mobile forums at my.opera.com, everyone is complaining about how slowly Opera Mobile is progressing… They’ve been stuck at version 8 for ages now.

“when desktop development was rapid and the browser made big improvements on a (bi-\tri-) monthly basis”

Yeah yeah, keep making up stuff.

Apparently you don’t know how the market works, you don’t know what Opera does, you don’t know what products are progressing at what speed, etc. You basically don’t seem to know much of anything, and yet you make all these outlandish claims about how Opera’s ignoring the desktop, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

It’s interesting to note the revenue increase on the desktop side - that surprises me, actually, I thought the plan was to take a hit on the browser front so as to get Opera’s name out there. Such increases of the desktop team’s size are irrelevant, though, if they continue to focus on things like further standards support, small screen rendering, and widgets, because these features to me seem like they’re more applicable to all Opera browsers than the desktop alone. My guess is that if the desktop team has expanded, the reason their product isn’t as exciting as it once was is because they’re doing a lot of the development of Opera’s fundamentals that the Mobile, Wii, etc teams base their work upon.

Regardless, you can wail about how I’m only unimpressed because the new features of Opera don’t suit me, or that I somehow change my story every post I make because I concede that there _are_ new features, but I keep returning to the same point - in spite of its big development team, and severe usability problems, and tiny marketshare, Opera desktop has not really progressed in the places it should do, and instead all of the exciting development work coming out of Opera is on the mobile front. It seems to reflect a company-wide focus on the mobile space that was not as big a deal back in, say, 2000-2003, when desktop development was rapid and the browser made big improvements on a (bi-\tri-) monthly basis. This is no longer the case.

He seems to think that Opera is focusing more on the “mobile space” when the fact is that Opera’s desktop team is bigger than ever, and desktop revenues have increased by more than 100% several quarters in a row because of more users. Desktop makes up about a quarter of Opera’s total revenues. In order to think that Opera is focusing their development elsewhere, one must be unaware of these simple facts that can be found in Opera’s quarterly presentations, and in various employee blogs.

Why do people like SuitCase insist on making assumptions about what Opera is focusing on, as if his uninformed opinion on what Opera is actually focusing on carries any weight?

The only thing I wonder, and this is probably more a point for Daniel to comment on, is how much Opera is really concentrating on the desktop market, I think in many ways its been perhaps ever so slightly sidelined. The video after all seems to put far more emphasis on Operas mobile prowess over that of its desktop counterpart. Also, I’m sure to someone new to Opera, even from Firefox it could appear potentially daunting, the GUI has some pretty major differences after all. Perhaps this could be an installer option to make it look closer to IE or FF so that people can get used to it slowly rather than being thrown in at the deep end.

As a side note, its also interesting that most of the replies countering your posts are from users who don’t appear to be using Opera, perhaps just browser identification but still…

Just my 2p (£)

Talk about “explaining away” all you like, but in the context of the real world, Opera’s dinky little updates through the past four years pale in comparison to those made by tons of apps out there, many with far smaller development teams. It is a shame for Opera desktop, which used to move much faster in years past. Why is it so hard to grasp that this has happened, when it makes clear business sense for Opera to focus their development on the much more profitable mobile space?

Besides, even if you did surprise me with one great new feature I’ve forgotten, that does not diminish my argument much. Opera desktop’s development has gone off track since it went free and it’s been less and less relevant since.

UI has stagnated. This is subjective so I can’t “prove” you wrong. But just consider how Firefox took over the niche browser market with its IE6-like UI, and how Opera could have possibly failed as badly as it has to capture new marketshare. Anecdotally, I find it’s often due to the UI, and Opera has so many talented people they could have been doing 7.0-like revisions yearly to make the UI completely powerful, accessible and innovative. They didn’t, and so Opera 9.5 looks and works approximately the same as Opera 7.0, give or take a toggleable toolbar.

Stop getting so mad about this. Is Opera your girlfriend or something? Just realise you’re talking to the person who wrote http://www.soaringrabbit.com/opera/operaold.html and angered a ton of Firefox fans in the process (I still get great refererer links in my Apache logs to discussion threads and such.) I want Opera desktop to get better, I just think that Opera has concentrated mainly on the mobile\gadget market for the past few years and is not nearly as committed to Opera desktop as they were when it was a commercial product.

UI has stagnated? Ever considered that maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe it’s a good thing to do it right and keep it that way unless there’s a good reason to change it? Duh.

But now it’s 2004, is it? Well clearly you are going to keep ignoring facts, or better yet, move your goalpost every time you are proven wrong. Pathetic.