IE8 Losing Popularity Contest in EU Browser Ballot

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
[citation][nom]p05esto[/nom]I'm a web developer of 15 years and highly prefer IE over other browsers. Seems the fastest, is proven the most secure and loads the fastest thanks to being woven into the OS. The UI is the best as well, perfectly matching Windows, updates with Windows Update, very easy for most people.Each to his own, nothing wrong with other browsers. Just saying M$ kiddie basher dorks get tired after a while, find something else to bitch about. You don't even know what you talk about...yea, end rant[/citation]
IE may be the fastest loading and the best matching for Windows, but how does this at all relate to how good the browser is as an independent application? If you put it on another OS it would no longer match the UI, nor would it load fast. The only weak conclusion that you can come to is that it is the best browser on Windows, and I can only come to that conclusion before taking into account compliance with web standards and page rendering speeds, at which point I would say it's the worst browser for Windows.
 
[citation][nom]Abrahm[/nom]I'm still waiting for an EU browser ballot mandate on Apple's OS X, and every Linux distribution.[/citation]
You could potentially argue this point for OSX, but the EU have no grounds to stand on with regards to Linux. If you take the most popular distribution, Ubuntu, for example, you'll see that the distribution is maintained by Canonical. Firefox is maintained by Mozilla. Neither company is pushing two of their own products in a bundled package. And even if they did, you can remove firefox from your system. You can't remove (all of) IE from Windows. Note that Canonical do not ship Kubuntu with Firefox, they ship it with Konquerer (I think?), so once again you have the company providing options. MS only ships IE.
 
It's funny...
When there are articles about Microsoft and their patent trolling, everyone (even Americans here) goes up the ceiling. When EU tries to level out and give others a chance to compete against the great American O/S monopoly that Microsoft carries, the very same Americans goes patriotic and blame the EU for being Anti-American. Couldn't it be that the American system is corrupt, allowing only the rich to get richer because they are the only ones who could afford legal suits and a team of lawyers. So you're actually defending a system that's robbing you off your civil rights against Goliath? Why? The American dream? The dream that anyone one day could be dirt rich by inventing a new toothpick? Forget it! How many Americans today are not wealthy? That's just because you still live on the dream from the postwar prosperous fifties. You can't ask the monopolists to regulate themselves. That won't happen. Every big monopoly company rules the market as if it were a communist state. It decides what the customers wants, needs and how much. Everyone, including Americans, should be happy about that there still are some corners left in the world that tries to defend the free enterprises by giving every one a chance.

BTW,
I'm glad that the Americans now maybe getting somewhat equal rights when it comes to health care, as we in Europe and even developing countries have enjoyed for decades. Even though the henchmen from the insurance companies tried to do whatever they could to stop this bill. Obama is the president America should had decades ago.
 
[citation][nom]joex444[/nom]Really. "Opera browser 10 is Internet Browser innovation."That's the tagline that won these idiots over? It's the one with grammatical flaws. Say what you will... the correct use of our language is a sign of intelligence. The improper use is therefore a sign of shoddy programs. Also, what's with Opera's image compression nonsense? Sure, its faster. But the web never looked worse.[/citation]

Touché... 😀
 
Opera's support forum is "user to user" so you never get any answer from developers. Suggesting a feature or report a bug is something like throw a stone to a well.
If you want a decent support for suggesting few features or report few bugs you have to pay for it.
 
Opera's support forum is "user to user" so you never get any answer from developers. Suggesting a feature or report a bug is something like throw a stone to a well.
If you want a decent support for suggesting few features or report few bugs you have to pay for it.
 
I'm just wondering what sort of negative results this will have. There is no single, everybody must have, browser. Each browser caters to a specific type of user. For casual users: IE, for power users: firefox, for lite users: chrome. Sorry Opera and Safari users I'm not familiar with your browsers. I use firefox myself, but there are a lot of people I wouldn't reccomend it to, people who have no idea why their system is suddenly crawling when all they did was load the kitty theme into their browser. Does the everyday individual know this? Highly unlikely. Chances are they'll select either the choice that "looks" the most attractive or one that some ignorant fanboy reccomends. On the upside, we should be seeing an increase in the computer technician business in the UK
 
[citation][nom]DFGum[/nom]Shrug, all my friends rant about firefox and how they have noscript and all this, but i use my IE just fine and have no keylogging/security problems. Of course i dont even run a antivirus, because i don't go randomly looking at sites i know could be comprimised, and i keep my stuff up to date? Zero problems.I do have firefox and chrome installed tho and do use them occasionally.[/citation]
You've been p0wned and don't even know it then. I'm sure that you keep up with the 50 thousand malware infected sites (and growing daily) that are out there and avoid them all.
 
Only a matter of time before Windows itself follows suit. If Apple would release OSX to OEM's like Dell and Toshiba, the Windows market would come to a quick end.
 
So downloads of Opera have tripled?
Wow, so there are now 60 people using it!

Seriously, if Chrome and Firefox could grab substantial market share WITHOUT the silly browser ballot, why (if its so damn good) couldn't Opera do the same?? Basically they SUCK at marketing and promoting their browser. If they'd stop adding stupid features that nobody will ever use and focus a bit on increasing their brand exposure then they might have gotten somewhere without having to go crying to the EU and complaining that big bad microsoft makes it impossible for their flawed business model to work despite FF and Chrome doing just fine.
Freaking crybabies!
 
[citation][nom]zybch[/nom]So downloads of Opera have tripled?Wow, so there are now 60 people using it!Seriously, if Chrome and Firefox could grab substantial market share WITHOUT the silly browser ballot, why (if its so damn good) couldn't Opera do the same?? Basically they SUCK at marketing and promoting their browser. If they'd stop adding stupid features that nobody will ever use and focus a bit on increasing their brand exposure then they might have gotten somewhere without having to go crying to the EU and complaining that big bad microsoft makes it impossible for their flawed business model to work despite FF and Chrome doing just fine.Freaking crybabies![/citation]
Chrome isn't doing "just fine," it's got a handful of percentage points of browser usage. Given how everybody raves about its features, you'd think it would be doing great, especially since it's pretty high-profile and backed by one of the biggest companies in internet history. Even Firefox doesn't have a quarter of the market all to itself, despite being leaps and bounds beyond the closest competitors in the market and older than half of them. IE is still king of the heap, and most of that is due (directly or indirectly) to it being the default browser in Windows.

If I had to take a wild flying guess, I'd imagine the reason FF took off and Opera didn't is because FF was open-source, meaning it had an instant home in the hearts of technogeeks everywhere when it was launched. Because of that it had much better word-of-mouth advertising than Opera, even though Opera had tabbed browsing first and better standards compliance. Also, for a long time after other browsers dropped costs to zero Opera wasn't free, or (worse still) the free version had ads built into it.

I agree that Opera could probably do more to get the word out (though recent coverage of 10.50 has been widespread), but it's not like they didn't have a point in their complaint to the commission.
 
What was their point?? That somehow MS actively prevented people from downloading Opera? Please!
A OS without a browser is just stupid, MS has included one with windows since the days of 95 and users are quite free to download ANY of the other browsers and use them instead.

Why should MS (or any company for that matter) be forced to advertise and promote their competition's products? Seriously, how hard is it to point IE at mozilla.com or opera.com, then download and use their products instead of IE. "Not very" is the answer I think you'll find.

Last time I checked IE was around 60% marketshare, thats NOT a monopoly, so why is it being treated as if it is?
Sure, MS did some dick moves YEARS ago, but its a very different company now. I'm much more worried about the rise of google and how they treat my information that I ever was about MS and the huge market share they built because people preferred their products.
 
[citation][nom]Ephebus[/nom]I've been using Opera since version 3.5 I guess (sometime around 1997), and it's the center of everything I do on the Internet - it's just that good. Just avoid version 10.5x and stick to version 10.10 or earlier. Opera devs seem too obsessed with gaining market share at any cost, even if that means degrading what always worked well in Opera, and have managed to make version 10.5x look and work like some type of Chrome meets Safari clone. The Opera forums are filled with long time Opera users, who like me have been promoting the browser for over a decade, complaining about what they're turning Opera into. Problem is, those forums are also administered by people who most probably weren't even there when Opera started and most posts containing negative criticism simply get deleted, or at least the topics are locked. There's also a group of users who seem to be there 24 hours a day ready to flame any critics of version 10.5x (watch out for a guy nicknamed Pesala). Some examples:http://my.opera.com/community/foru [...] ?id=478101http://my.opera.com/community/foru [...] ?id=471831http://my.opera.com/community/foru [...] ?id=448311http://my.opera.com/community/foru [...] ?id=433401http://my.opera.com/community/foru [...] ?id=437721http://my.opera.com/community/foru [...] ?id=471691http://my.opera.com/community/foru [...] ?id=472271[/citation]

I'm also a longtime Opera user and--dude--nobody is interested in you airing your dirty laundry here. That's not what this discussion is for. Why would you even bring up someone's NAME here? Totally uncool. Anyway, the vast majority of users believe that 10.51 is SO VASTLY SUPERIOR to anything Opera has offered before that it should be called Opera 11. It's the only browser that regularly scores faster than Chrome, and it does so with about a zillion more features than Chrome. And the Windows 7 integration is just superb.
 
[citation][nom]richardwrite[/nom]Anyway, the vast majority of users believe that 10.51 is SO VASTLY SUPERIOR to anything Opera has offered before that it should be called Opera 11. It's the only browser that regularly scores faster than Chrome, and it does so with about a zillion more features than Chrome. And the Windows 7 integration is just superb.[/citation]

Much on the opposite. That's just what you're desperately trying to make it look like, by locking or deleting every single topic or post with negative criticism towards Opera 10.5x in the Opera forums and banning their authors. Keep it on, that won't stop people from exposing the FACTS somewhere else, which are:

1 - Versions 10.5x were rushed to meet the European regulations regarding Windows 7, more specifically the compulsory presence of a browser selection ballot, and as a result are severely bugged.

2 - Changes were made to the browser's appearance and usability that degraded it and displeased most long time users. The idea seems to have been that making Opera look and work like some kind of Chrome meets Safari clone would help it gain market share, which seems to be an obsession to some people - no matter at what cost.
 

Where did you read that? It's nowhere to be found at opera.com


Compression lets you surf faster on slow connections (which means most of the world, including most of the US).


Not necessarily. However, it is anti-competitive if a monopoly is used to undermine competition, which Microsoft did. They didn't just bundle IE. They also bullied OEMs, introduced proprietary stuff like ActiveX, etc.


There is real money in the browser market.
 

Opera has 50 million desktop users, and another 50 million users of Opera mini.

So Opera has at least 100 million users.

Firefox has something like 300 million users.


Because unlike both Firefox and Chrome, Opera has not been promoted by Google's online advertising monopoly?

Furthermore, the browser ballot was Microsoft's own idea. Opera had nothing to do with it.


Actually, Opera is doing just fine. The company is profitable, and the desktop user base has more than doubled every two years or so.


Mozilla blogged much more extensively about the EU case after joining it (along with Google). Why are you only whining about Opera?

And why are you not attacking Google for their antitrust complaints against Microsoft? And Microsoft for its antitrust complaints against Google?

Hypocrisy, perhaps?
 
Congratulations EU, you've turned into the de facto babysitters of the internet. Perhaps you'd care to get little Opera and Chrome a blankie and a bottle while you coddle them some more. Or maybe you should just let them suck at your teet. Socialists...
Click to expand...
Considering that the US has the exact same antitrust laws, I guess you just shot yourself in the foot. Now you are going to tell me that the US is Socialist?

Are you an Anarchist, since you don't seem to want any laws governing the market? No health rules for hospitals? No safety rules for airliners? No rules for nuclear plants?



I haven't had a single problem with the new version of Opera. I have also been reading numerous reviews, and they all love it. Looks like most of the world has no problems with it what so ever.


Guess it sucks to be them, then. Then again, I doubt that you are in a position to speak on behalf of most long time users.


Ah, so you don't want Opera to be successful. You want it to cater to your personal needs and no one else's. I get it.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom