Disclaimer: Long time Opera user and probably an Opera browser fan.
I have been using Opera since its "ad-supported" days. It was bundled with one of those PC magazines that gave out free software/shareware for the bandwidth challenged in those days (97/98-ish?), and fell in love instantly.
Opera is probably the most configurable, hackable and feature-full browser out there up to this day, and I still find things to configure and customise to this day (now on Opera 12.10). Opera also provides the user with an option to install itself as a portable version which I found very cool. It is also very light on PC resources (YMMV -- anecdata)
I also find it very annoying that a looot of websites do not support this browser.... at all despite its being on par (if not better) in most if not all browser tests (I heard they lagged behind on the most recent tests).
Opera Mini is blazingly fast on not-so-smartphones (used it on the Nokia ASHA series) and Android smartphones as well (anecdata -- my experience). It beats out Nokia's own browser which incidentally has adopted the "Turbo" architecture for its own browsers.
IMO the article does great disservice to Opera's technical/technological advanced capabilities by ignoring all of those and solely focussing the article around socialism and dictatorship and poor net connections in "those other countries" instead ( [almost] creating a straw-man in the process). Booo!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4801782
FWIW, this comment from that thread had many good insights.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804173
@4ad makes some good points (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4828181) in this thread. FWIW, I am reproducing my comment from that previous thread here.
Disclaimer: Long time Opera user and probably an Opera browser fan.
I have been using Opera since its "ad-supported" days. It was bundled with one of those PC magazines that gave out free software/shareware for the bandwidth challenged in those days (97/98-ish?), and fell in love instantly.
Opera is probably the most configurable, hackable and feature-full browser out there up to this day, and I still find things to configure and customise to this day (now on Opera 12.10). Opera also provides the user with an option to install itself as a portable version which I found very cool. It is also very light on PC resources (YMMV -- anecdata)
I also find it very annoying that a looot of websites do not support this browser.... at all despite its being on par (if not better) in most if not all browser tests (I heard they lagged behind on the most recent tests).
Opera Mini is blazingly fast on not-so-smartphones (used it on the Nokia ASHA series) and Android smartphones as well (anecdata -- my experience). It beats out Nokia's own browser which incidentally has adopted the "Turbo" architecture for its own browsers.
IMO the article does great disservice to Opera's technical/technological advanced capabilities by ignoring all of those and solely focussing the article around socialism and dictatorship and poor net connections in "those other countries" instead ( [almost] creating a straw-man in the process). Booo!