Why should I care about Opera?

Question

Firstly, I am not against Opera. It seems to me that when I encounter problems with a cross browser and do a little research, I always find a “fix”, but then I see a comment in which a foul cries that the cross browser solution I'm looking at does not work in Opera.

I do not care? When IE finally starts to work along with IE 9, Google Chrome and other Safari like browsers that go well and Firefox is stable, as always, is this a problem I need to worry about? Should I cheat until I earn Opera, if it takes a long time? Is Opera really so innovative that its market share will be hacked for Safari, Firefox, IE and Chrome?

My tendency at this moment is to wait for Opera to catch up and leave my scripts supporting 4 large browsers as they are. Of course, debugging scripts in Opera can help me learn something new. But sometimes I have a big fist to fry. Opera will catch up or die. Perhaps he has already caught up, I know that the release cycle is pretty fast for Opera. So maybe the problems that I see on the forums are nil at the moment.

Agree or disagree?

Answer 1

I would think about my clients and try to get statistics about different markets.

In some regions, Opera is a Top 3 browser and is not far behind IE and Firefox (for example, Russia), so you should take care of Opera if you do not want to lose customers. In other regions, such as US Opera, almost nonexistent.

Answer 2

Answer: it depends on your marketing research. If none of your users / platforms can use Opera now or in the future, then it does not matter. If your company has a large group of solutions, the solution of which supports browsers, and you support Opera, then you have no choice.

On the other hand, if you make decisions and you have little information about your markets or existing statistics from your users, you can go with general studies: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

For platform examples, Nintendo strongly supports Opera: http://www.opera.com/devices/

I understand that technology leaders sometimes (like the gaming industry) crowd out the market. They have a strong idea of ​​word of mouth, and they can drive trends.

Speaking of word of mouth, the viciousness of your users is generally bad for business :)

To support weird browsers, many developers create libraries that include quirk modes and simply call them, instead of worrying about problems on the page. I am not a web developer, but I understand that there are existing libraries that do this too.

This site also looks promising: http://www.quirksmode.org/

Answer 3

When you select a browser as the main test platform, you make an implicit choice of a set of functions and quirks. During development, you usually avoid these quirks (sometimes with risky or breaking workarounds) and use these features (which may be vendor specific or patented).

When testing and caring for a large number of browsers, you will be more aware of which features are standardized and reliable, you will find out where the workaround against A quirks is risky and breaks B, and your code as a whole will improve. For me, the best answer (besides the “test for what your users use”) is that the best code today gives you better future compatibility . Perhaps testing with Opera today will identify a CSS fragment that would cause problems in IE10?

(I would actually argue that you should not work with errors in small browsers - if you are sure that the error is in the browser and not in your code, report the error and leave it.)

Answer 4

You should also take care of Opera if you like mobile phone users. I am developing C #, and I noticed that Opera provides websites just like browsers for mobile phones (usually blackberries). This is the same with the syntax xml, cdata, javascript. When firefox, chrome and IE display websites, Opera and mobile phones will find their own errors. Just a simple testing tool :)

Answer 5

The only reason I care is that it still has a market share and ignores it, it alienates the percentage of users (no matter how small they are)

Answer 6

You do not have to care. The implementation of Opera is even worse than MSIE.

Consider, for example, their "Development Console":

http://dev.opera.com/tools/

Here is the code that they provide to download it (on the "Developer Console" button on this page):

function(){ var ele=document.documentElement.appendChild( document.createElementNS('http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml', 'script') ); ele.onload = function(){ this.parentNode.removeChild(this); }; ele.src='http://devfiles.myopera.com/tools/developer/8679/devConsole.js'; })() 

The problem is that the link to the JavaScript source does not work and returns 404:

http://devfiles.myopera.com/tools/developer/8679/devConsole.js

Do you really want to do product-based web development from a company that cannot manage its own web development (or website)?

Move together and work with browsers that people use.