Opera Software has just organized a Ask Me Anything activity on Reddit, which gave a fantastic opportunity to the users like me to ask anything about Opera products, and Opera’s engineers and marketers answered such questions. I asked a plain (and very natural) question to Opera team, "despite of having almost all essential features, fastest speed and innovative ideas, why Opera (desktop) does not have a larger market share??".
According to Opera Software, "We’re the oldest browser company around (remember Netscape? Yeah, so do we). We have a desktop browser that has about 3% market share worldwide, and we make the world’s most popular mobile browser. In total there are 140 million Opera users across the globe.".
My question was answered by Opera employee opvard:
"Well, first of all, it is very difficult to measure market share. For example, Net Applications insists that Opera desktop has a higher share of the market than Opera Mini, despite Opera Mini having more users (and Net Application counts users, not page hits).
That said, one should keep in mind that Opera is an independent browser vendor, and doesn’t have the backing of huge corporations, like most of the other "big browsers" do. For example, Google can plaster the web with Chrome ads "for free" because it is in a dominant position in the online advertising market.
It should be noted that Opera actually has a market share of up to 20-30% in some markets. In total, Opera has more than 140 million users, which means a total global market share of about 7% (since there are nearly 2 billion people online in total).
The US has been a hard nut to crack, of course. But we are doing fairly well on the desktop in emerging markets. We’re doing even better on mobile because in many parts of the world that’s the only way you can get online."
Another interesting answer by Reddit user akatherder:
A lot of experienced computer users picked their favorite browser while Opera was still charging $40 for a license or still had an ad banner embedded in their browser. So, was it better at that time? Probably, but I didn’t realize it. Tabs are essential now, but I didn’t "get" them at the time. I didn’t "get" all the features that I wasn’t accustomed to and didn’t need. I certainly wasn’t paying any money or dealing with a silly ad bar.
So I went with Firefox because it was free and better than IE. When Firefox did not behave or do something I wanted, I didn’t think "Hmm, maybe I should try Opera again" I thought "Hmm, I wonder what extension will fix this."
Well, a good news: Opera to introduce extensions soon! :)
(ps: I’m a Opera+Firefox user, and a member of Opera campus crew program)
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Arpit,I use at least two chrome extensions created by you. and you say that you are a opera+ff user. don’t you use Chrome??
Some good explanations. This reminds me of when I used Opera, but only after I figured-out how to remove the ads.
I’ve got a question for Opvard: in what way does Firefox have “the backing of huge corporations”? Firefox does qualify as “big” and technically Mozilla Foundation is a corporation, but if that is what you mean then you are stretching it here.
I think maybe it’s not as popular as some others because each version has a few difficult areas and not every page is rendered as well as in some other browsers, it has seemed to me over the years. It’s been necessary to keep an IE or a FF or something like that on hand as well as an Opera. I use it anyway, it gets better and better and the features, for the most part, I like so much, including the integrated mail feature.