Opera has been ahead of the curve for features virtually forever (currently: tab stacking, right click anywhere to add search, and 'g searchterm' syntax). It is also much more memory-efficient than chrome/FF with many tabs.
I think it has just never been seen as 'sexy' by the tech geeks, and therefore never evangelised.
Surprisingly Opera's strong showing in mobile/wii didn't impact the desktop. Does HN think it might do better if it was open-sourced?
Yes I agree that Opera has had lots of great ideas, many which have later been introduced into the 'mainstream' browsers and yet they (Opera) fail to generate any marketshare.
Perhaps it is because it's closed sourced, I don't know.
Personally I went with Firefox rather than Opera back in the day mainly due to Firefox extensions (nowadays Opera supports extensions aswell) and have stuck with it since I know it so well and it works fine.
> right click anywhere to add search, and 'g searchterm' syntax
Both of these features are available in both Firefox and Chrome by default. I don't know about tab stacking (since I have no interest in the feature), but it's probably possible in Firefox with an extension, but not in Chrome.
I think it has just never been seen as 'sexy' by the tech geeks, and therefore never evangelised.
Surprisingly Opera's strong showing in mobile/wii didn't impact the desktop. Does HN think it might do better if it was open-sourced?