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Thread ID: 93665	2008-09-26 09:52:00	Opera	wmoore (6009)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
708055	2008-09-26 09:52:00	There is a number on here who love Opera. And it has some great features straight out of the box, better than FF in the regard, but was does it have such a tiny market share compared to IE and FF. Is it marketing ? or something else. Just interested.	wmoore (6009)
708056	2008-09-26 10:39:00	marketing. FF got a big fan base going even when it was only in development. whatever is new and the latest thing always gets a lot of fans. having fans makes it popular. being popular more people will use it. FF has probably more fans than the parent mozilla ever had. also you have to remember that until recently opera used to disguise itself as other browsers to get around useless web designers. hence websites don't often know that is opera being used, so in the stats it looks like opera doesn't get used. edit:i forgot that opera used to be ad supported which put off a lot of people. especially as spyware became such a big problem which further put off uses. however now opera is ad free.	tweak'e (69)
708057	2008-09-26 22:03:00	I can't remember how Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox marketed itself when it was first released but I only found out about it through word of mouth from fellow geeks, the same way I found out about Opera, which I was using prior to trying out Phoenix/Firebird . As mentioned previously, up until fairly recently users of Opera had to put up with adverts at the top of the page unless they paid for the browser and in my experience quite a few people were put off by that . Or used the adverts as an excuse not to use Opera, anyway . Also, Opera looked quite different to Internet Explorer and that put people off as well . It can be made to look almost identical to IE but most people aren't adventurous enough to spend a little time customising the browser to their own preferences with skins, toolbars, etc . Phoenix and its offspring, however, wasn't quite so radical in its GUI which appealed to people and consequently gained it more fans . These days Firefox is definitely marketed far more agressively than Opera is but once people find out that Opera exists many of them give Opera a try and discover that it is indeed a far better browser . The Opera forums are full of ex-Firefox users wanting to know how to make Opera perform many of the functions it has built in that Firefox needs extensions for .	CI Sue (14168)
708058	2008-09-28 00:13:00	Opera is great, but it still has little bugs re css etc. So its not as prefect as I would like. But FF & IE are a lot worse and bloated. FF takes forever to start, I click on opera & ff (& vice versa) and I have 4 websites up on Opera before FF has LOADED!	zcc (50)
708059	2008-09-28 00:35:00	Name=Fail. Ad supported=Fail	Metla (12)
708060	2008-09-28 01:44:00	I've been user of Opera for 5yrs or so. The advertising dissappeared about 4 yrs ago. I initially tried Opera because it wasn't IE and really liked the Tabs and mouse gestures features (both predated FF). Since then I have just stayed with Opera. It does everything that I want from a browser from the start. Email, news groups and browsing of course. I realise that FF has lots of plugins etc but all the features that I need are already built into Opera. Why isn't it as popular as FF. I think its something to do with initially being ad supported and not Opensource. They lost a window to establish themselves as the IE alternative and have struggled to catch up. ie marketing plus not as "sexy" open source project. I also found some of the comparisons on the web over the years between FF and Opera a little unfair where reviewers admit to already being regular users of FF and very rarely of opera.	afe66 (13778)
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