Ask HN: Is Opera stagnating?

9 points

15 years ago

I feel if there was ever a time for Opera to break into the mainstream, it would have been these past few years. Internet Explorer's market share has gone nowhere but down since 2009, Chrome usage doubled in 2011, and Safari is always making steady gains. [1]

I ask because I am an Opera user. Over 2011 I have experienced imperfect support for Google+, Google Docs and Twitter. I've seen Unite, which I feel is still ahead of its time, fail to take off. The Widgets seem all but dead. The extensions development community seems much less robust than for other browsers. One would have expected Opera to benefit from the gains made by Firefox and Chrome in recent years. Yet Opera market share always seems to be just under 2%. In fact, their market share has been shrinking of late. [2]

Is Opera going to be forever stuck under 2%? If so, doesn't that mean Opera will never have success with features that depend on community involvement such as widgets, extensions, and Unite?

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser_market_share

2: http://insights.chitika.com/2011/web-browser-market-share-november-2011/

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