Sour Grapes from Opera?

[Aristotle]

I read this, and first I chuckled:

Opera: Firefox user figures 'inflated'

The chief executive of Opera Software claimed on Monday that the market share figures for Mozilla Firefox are inflated, due to its support for link prefetching.

Link prefetching is a mechanism that uses browser idle time to download Web pages that the user might visit in the near future. This feature is enabled by default in Firefox 1.0. Google added support for link prefetching to its search engine earlier this year, which means that Firefox will pre-load the top search results into its cache.

Firefox and Opera have a market share of 8.7 and 1.0 percent respectively, according to the latest figures from Web traffic measurement company OneStat.com. Microsoft's Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser, accounting for 86.6 percent of Web surfers. But Jon von Tetzchner, the chief executive of Opera, claimed that Opera's market share is likely to be higher than these statistics suggest, as it does not support pre-fetching and has a more efficient caching mechanism.

"Sadly the statistics are undercounting Opera and overcounting Firefox. Opera has a better caching mechanism so it doesn't access Web sites as often as other browsers. Firefox has added a pre-loading feature that Google has made use of. This inflates the numbers on the statistics," von Tetzchner said.

While some of what he is saying may indeed be true, it strikes me as 1) irrelevant and 2) ignorant of who the REAL enemy is (Microsoft/Internet Explorer).

Now, here comes the SERIOUS sour grapes:

Although a free version of Opera is available, this version has advertising built-in, while a paid version without advertising is also available. Von Tetzchner admitted that the adverts put off some users, but as his firm does not have independent funding it has little choice.

"A lot of people don't like our ads, which is sad as we don't have a rich sugar daddy like the Mozilla Foundation. They [the Mozilla Firefox team] don't have to think about money as they're being funded. We're not being funded," said von Tetzchner.

I hate to see this. I think Opera and Firefox are both positive forces for the web. I personally use Firefox and love it, and have never tried Opera for more than a few minutes. Despite that, I would like to see them both succeed.

I don't think it is productive at all for the smaller guys to snipe at each other.

[Gesslar]

"sugar daddy" indeed. Opera isn't open source, it's closed source. if it were open source, people who love the browser would be more than willing to contribute to it and they could find a home at sourceforge. they just wouldn't make money off it. maybe when the GPL Qt 4.0 for Win32 libraries are released? Well, probably not, but that would be a good option for them. Alternatively, they could always have used the GTK+ libraries that Firefox uses.

of course, that's a whole other business model. wah wah.

[Aristotle]

I actually didn't know Opera was closed source.

I am not an open source zealot, but there are some things that I think SHOULD be open source due to the nature of the program.

Operating systems, web browsers, and things of that nature should be open source since they are the gateways that allow people to use their computers and the internet.

That's just my view on the matter.