News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

October 10, 2008

software

Opera reaches version 9.6, gets new senior designer

Posted Oct. 10, ’08, 4:54 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Software

Opera I don’t envy Opera one bit. They’ve always been a minority player in the web browser market. Originally, this was easily attributed to being one of the few for-pay browsers. It had a dedicated following, but hardly large. They started giving it away for free, which I have no doubt increased their market share, but not in an obvious way.

The problem is that despite having a good product, it has competition in the form of browsers backed by corporate giants: Microsoft (Internet Explorer), Mozilla (Firefox), Apple (Safari), and Google (Chrome). With the exception of Mozilla, the web browser is not their primary product. Opera also seems to suffer from a lack of quality PR. They can’t seem to market their own bread and butter.

Good news for the company has come in the form of Jon Hicks, who has played a key role in the logo and branding of Firefox and Thunderbird. In his new role as Senior Designer, I have no doubt he’ll find a way to make Opera more appealing for a broader audience.

In related news, Opera got bumped to version 9.6. The new version improves the included email client with better performance and a low bandwidth mode. Its free browser sync service also got some loving, syncing more of your precious configuration data.

[via Ars Technica]


1 Comments

Call Me Yo Daddy Author Profile Page said:

Opera 9.6 seems to be a big improvement over 9.5. However the default UI is horrible and only a hand full of themes are barely ok. I believe Opera's time has passed. The Opera folks used some bad strategies and did not market their browser heavily enough before the advent of Firefox. Opera's new efforts come too little and too late.

Firefox 3 is a great browser but for cosmetic reasons and other little small touches, I keep coming back to Safari via the nightly builds of Webkit.

October 11, 2008 9:53 PM

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