Why Should I Care About Opera?

Question

Firstly, I'm not against Opera. It just seems when I encounter cross browser issues, and do a little research, I always find "the fix", but then I see a comment crying foul that the cross browser solution I'm looking at doesn't work in Opera.

Should I care? With IE finally getting its act together with IE 9, Google's Chrome and other Safari like browsers coming along nicely, and Firefox rock stable as always is this an issue I need to worry about? Is it worth it to me to fool around until I get Opera working if it is time consuming? Is Opera really that innovative to where it's market share will shoot up past Safari, Firefox, IE, and Chrome?

My inclination at this point is to wait for Opera to catch up and leave my scripts that support the big 4 browsers as is. Sure debugging the scripts in Opera could help me learn something new. But sometimes I have bigger fist to fry. Opera will catch up or die. It might already have caught up, I know the release cycle is fairly quick now for Opera. So maybe the issues I see in the forums are null at this point.

Agree or disagree?

Answer 1

I would think about my customers here and try to get stats about different markets.

In some regions Opera is the Top 3 browser & not too far behind IE and Firefox (for example, Russia) so you should care about Opera if you don't want to lose customers. In other regions like US Opera's share is almost non existent.

Answer 2

The answer is, it depends on your market research. If none of your users/platforms are likely to use Opera now, or in the future, then it doesn't matter. If your company has a larger group making the decisions of which browsers to support, and you are supporting Opera, then you have no choice.

On the other hand, if you are making the decisions, and you don't have much information on your markets, or existing statistics from your users, you could go with general research: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

For platform examples, Nintendo seems to strongly support Opera: http://www.opera.com/devices/

I understand that tech-heads sometimes (the gaming industry as an example) drive the market. They have a strong word-of-mouth representation, and can lead trends.

Speaking of word-of-mouth, angering your users is generally bad for business :)

In order to support strange browsers, many developers create libraries that includes quirk-modes, and simply call into those, instead of worrying about problems per-page. I am not a web developer, but I understand there are existing libraries that also do this.

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