Opera users (All 6 of them) are more fanatical and delusional than Apple Zealots (with frankly less justification) and they annoy the crap out of me with the way they hijack every browser discussion on the internet. Try to discuss the various merits of TraceMonkey and V8 (they’re fast right?) and some muppet will throw in some totally irrelevant observation about Opera. Try and compare and contrast IE7′s and IE8′s rendering engines and some Opera user will appear to talk about how standard compliant Opera is. New version of a Browser with a new feature or a new Firefox extension? Then expect to see hundreds of comments of how Opera does the same thing already. Though they will forget to mention it doesn’t do it (whatever it is) anywhere near as well.

They are a bunch of entitled whiners, the Newcastle supporters of computing. Opera deserves to win everything and have praise heaped upon it. I tried to think of some non-UK centric equivalents but I couldn’t come up with anything. My sport knowledge is somewhat limited because, you know, I’m a geek. Feel free to post international equivalents to Newcastle football supporters in the comments.

Opera users please can you answer me this damned question. If Opera is so brilliant why isn’t everyone using it? Or at least have more people using it than are using Chrome, which came out like yesterday. Let me guess an evil Firefox/Google/Microsoft conspiracy? Stupid users? Or are you going for the Opera user change their Browser identity string to get around lazy/corrupt Web Developer’s who try and block them from viewing websites? How can a browser that has been around longer than most others have such a small user base? How shit must the Opera marketing people be? The problem is that Opera scratches no particular itch. It isn’t just there, familiar and convenient like IE or Safari, it isn’t extendible to the same extent as Firefox and it isn’t as lean and as technically excellent as Chrome. Any Web Developer worth his salt will have Firefox and a host of Web Developer centric extensions installed so they can’t even count on the tech crowd any more. Though it might help if Opera spent more time working on the basic Web Browser features and stopped adding useless crap like bittorrent clients and web servers. They can’t find a niche so are desperate to create one, and failing miserably.

By the way Unite in Opera 10 is rubbish. Virtually useless (doubly so because nobody else uses it) and clumsy to use.

For the record I used to pay for Opera back in the day, you know when it was still a good browser. Before they got Fisher Price to re-design the interface (twice) and started adding every trendy gimmick they could get their hands on in a desperate attempt to make their product matter. I’ve also installed every major release version of Opera since version 3 because as a professional Web Developer I do my testing properly. I’ve not seen a single reason to use any release of Opera as my main browser since version 6.