[thelist] How many people use Opera?

Stuart Young syoung at unitec.ac.nz
Wed Aug 27 00:08:27 CDT 2003


is it possible to tell how many people use Opera, given that by default, Opera identifies itself as IE (in order to get past bad browser detection javascripts used instead of object detection javascripts).

The website stats saying that Opera represents only a tiny fraction of surfers are clearly completely untrustable, but what is the true number of users?

Opera themselves claim that there have been record numbers of downloads.
http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2003/08/05/ 

so, do web designers need to rethink their assumptions that Opera doesn't matter and that they can safely design pages that don't work in Opera?

e.g.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
jeff at jeffhowden.com 13/07/2003 17:00:28 wrote:

yeah, opera is notoriously faulty when it comes to the most basic of dhtml,
even version 7.  apparently it doesn't want to obey the clipping rules.  oh
well, i'm not going to lose any sleep over a browser that represents <1% of
all the browsers that use the site.

thanks anyway,

.jeff

------------------------------------------------------



Dr Stuart Young,       +64 (0)9-815 4321 Ex 8656
<syoung at unitec.ac.nz>     
Lecturer, School of Computing and Information Technology,
UNITEC Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

"Have I lost faith in Microsoft? Yes, completely, I no 
longer care or believe any claim or announcement they 
make. I am not interested in their latest and greatest 
version of anything."




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