“No other survey comes close to the 140+ million unique visitors and so it’s the most accurate global measure that exists.”

Just because they CLAIM this and that doesn’t make it so.

And even if they do reach 140+ million unique visitors, that STILL doesn’t mean that their methodology is sound. Which, as demonstrated, it isn’t.

Net Applications is basically US only, as they admitted if you had bothered to read these before commenting:

http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/index.dml/tag/net%20applications

It is not the most accurate, as the link also shows. It claims that Chrome has more users than Opera despite the fact that Chrome had 10 million users while Opera had 30 according to both companies at the time.

Again, read the link. Net Applications is useless, their stats are dishonest, and they are actively manipulating their own stats and dumping Opera down on a regular basis when it starts going above 1%.

Opera is smaller. Compare the English installers. And Opera can run comfortably on slow mobile phones, whereas this is impossible for Firefox. They are working on it, but the requirements will be much higher than Opera’s

Opera is faster in real-world usage. Chrome is faster than Opera again, but Opera is definitely much faster than Firefox when rendering most sites. Opera’s UI is faster than both Chrome and Firefox.

If you read the articles i linked you you will see why Opera is reported as standing still. Remember, Net Applications used to report Opera at 5%, and then edited it overnight to be 0.0something. The same happened again when Opera+Opera Mini were approaching 2%. They edited their stats and sent both back to 0.0something.

Opera does not have 55% in Norway or Finland.

Opera is definitely growing more users, but unfortunately for them they’re not gaining any faster than the growth of the Web itself (more people coming online) so their market share is static.

Opera is not smaller than Firefox, and it’s not faster. More features? Sure, they’re better integrated, but it has way less features. And when I talk about never increasing, it’s because they’ve been there for YEARS, around the “just almost 1%”…

@ Andy

Firefox scores 55% on Norway, if I remember correctly. Or was it Finland? I forget.

This is mostly US statistics.

Are they working on not dishonestly editing their data multiple times without notice and not lying about their statistics?

Not sure why others are quoting them, but back in 2007 when I started to do this kind of reports, their data was more accurate.

By the way, they are working on their end now to increase share data accuracy in russia and some europe countries. As that’s pretty much the main reason why Opera has only 0.71 of the market share in NetApps.

http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/index.dml/tag/net%20applications

In fact, all browser stats are crap. Opera’s aggressive caching alone makes them useless because other browsers will lead to far more “hits” for each visit.

And I won’t even go into detail about the hundreds of sites Opera needs to do browser spoofing or custom JavaScript patches for!

I’ve just done some research on International browser usage covering United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, South Africa and Australia aggregated over 12 months.

It’s pretty consistent with your results for IE and FF with roughly an 80/20 split but FF does hit about 30% in Germany and France.

Tiago Sá, Opera usage does score significantly higher in Norway, about 9%, but you’d expect that!