Strong growth in users of Opera desktop browser; 20 million users
19 CommentsPublished March 3rd, 2008 4:21 PM EST By Daniel Goldman
The year of 2007 was a strong and positive one for the Opera desktop browser. At year’s end, there were more than 20 million monthly users of Opera on the desktop, a 55% increase from 2006.
The growth shows that there’s certainly an interest in alternative browsers, other than Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox.
Opera Link, currently available in Opera Mini 4 and the beta version of Opera 9.5, will give additional exposure to the Opera desktop browser. And I believe the popularity of Opera Mini is also giving the desktop browser a boost.
Photo credit: Oleg Melnychuck
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Nice Picture. I wonder if it will be used in Opera frontpage.
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Is that 20 million I.P addresses?
When I look at counters, such as extremetracking.com, Opera does seem to be a lot more common than it was a year ago.
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Quoting myself: “When I look at counters, such as extremetracking.com, Opera does seem to be a lot more common than it was a year ago.”
I only tend to look at English language sites, so areas where Opera is a common browser could be doing almost anything, and I would not know.
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Good news! The more the merrier! Opera deserves it.
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Wow, that image sucks… “let’s build the future together”, that slogan is so easy it hurts my gut. And a balloon? What does that have to do with browsing the at a blazing speed? An air balloon is probably the slowest way to fly!
That is way too zen, where’s the bleeding edge, the cool factor?
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lol… “too zen”
Well, it’s great that Opera’s market share is rising, but it’s still a long way to go.
The next year(s) is/are going to be interesting… it will be Opera 9.5 vs. Firefox 3 vs. IE8. But I guess the most important thing is that the latest trend seems to be improved standard compliance, which is the most important thing at the end of the day, IMO
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yeah, sure – the most important thing is the most important thing …damn am I tired
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Steve Barker, we get the number though the weekly automatic check for updates (discarding spam, of course).
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Good info, Daniel. Mentioning 20M users is better than the market share figures to get web sites thinking about the Opera user population…and not ignoring us/them.
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That pic was made by an Opera user, wasn’t it?
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yes. This is a desktop wallpaper by a fan. You can get them at http://my.opera.com/community/opera/wallpapers/?show=top
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That pic you included is pretty cool.
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What does ¨monthly user¨ mean? Is that the number of users who get checked for updates at least once a month? Or is it the total number of updates checked for? In the latter case, the number of opera users would be less than 20 million (i.e in the range of 5-6 million)
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Says who, Nilotpal? Where did you get the 5-6 million figure from?
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If updates are checked every week then one single installation of opera will check about 4 times a month. that is why I want to know what the term monthly user meant
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There are many users that have disabled autonatic check for updates! So, the growth may be bigger
Opera deserves at the least 200 milions users!
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Diado:
¨Opera deserves at the least 200 milions users¨
To that I agree. It IS the best browser out there.
While Firefox is good, I would put it at about fifth place in my order of preference: Opera, Konqueror, Seamonkey, K-meleon, Firefox.
And Opera deserves more than IE at least.
But the World is not perfect, not by a long run
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Linux live disks?
This PC has Ubuntu and Free BSD installed (at present). However, very often I, and many others try different OSs. I am currently running Opera on a Live Granular Linux CD. When booting from a CD you appear as a first time user every time you switch on, and get the Terms and Conditions etc., then you get told there is a later version – does this process each time count as an update check?
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“Lets build the future together” – That’s not likely to happen because Opera is not open source! Why choose a phrase with open source connotations for a closed source browser?