Day: 3 May 2005

Portable version of Opera?

You may have heard about the portable version of Firefox, that can be installed and run from a USB pen – and something similar for Thunderbird. Great stuff, according to some. I’ve even heard some claim this is a major advantage over Opera – because that browser don’t have sucha portable version, or?

Well – I installed Opera on a USB pen to try it out, and brought it with me to a PC without Opera installed (and where I can’t install anything.) You know what happened? It worked, just like that. So – we don’t need a separate version, we already have what we need as standard. What can be better than that? 😀

This works at least in both Windows and Linux – haven’t heard anything about other platforms.

Double that, please

That Opera was downloaded one million times in just four days is a well known fact. A certain CEO had to jump into the water because of it, too, creating quite a positive buzz for the browser. Now we learn that two million downloads of Opera 8 has passed in two weeks. That’s great news.

The question we may ask ourselves now is, will this download rate keep up? Who knows. The question we probably should ask ourselves is, how shall we keep this download rate up? Well, maybe we should do like those Firefox fans do? Put up those Opera stickers “everywhere” to show that hey, we use Opera – and it’s a great browser.

Have a web site? Put up a sticker for Opera. Made a WordPress template? Include an Opera sticker in it. And so on – you get my drift. Let’s help make Opera not just “the little browser that would” – but “the little browser that could!”

Something weird

What is going on here? I’m looking at my statistics, and find that for April Opera is represented by 16.2% of the browsers visiting my site. Those who have read my previous numbers see that there were quite a growth in Opera usage the first four months after I changed host, but it didn’t continue to grow like that. It stopped at 7-8%, with a dip down to 5.6% in March.

That Opera 8 was released in April could of course be an explaination – but these numbers were obvious early on, long before the release, so the explaination must be somewhere else. It will be interesting to see how May will turn out.

To continue with the numbers for the browsers I presented in January:

January February March April>
Internet Explorer 70.7% 65.0% 70.2% 63.3%
Opera 7.0% 8.2% 5.6% 16.2%
Firefox 9.6% 9.4% 10.0% 10.5%
Mozilla 2.3% 3.9% 3.3% 1.8%
Safari 2.2% 1.6% 2.1% 1.4%
Netscape 1.4% 1.2% 1.1% 0.9%
Konqueror 0.1% 0.1% 0.1% 0.2%

I’ll be crossing my fingers and hope that Opera won’t dip down again – at least not by much.After all, it is a terrific browser. 😉