> Even though Google is a major corporation, I doubt they can afford to spend the time fixing issues in a browser that gets lower single digit uses.
You're joking, I hope? Of course Google has the resources. It's one of the biggest companies in tech.
Not only does Google have the money to do it, but it really looks bad by not supporting Opera and telling people to use Chrome. Just to prevent that bad publicity it would be worth the money to just support Opera.
Furthermore, yes, Opera has low market share - a few percent globally. But it has very high market share in a few countries in Europe. Not supporting Opera is basically saying they don't support that country. Again, wouldn't it be worth the very small cost (in Google terms) to just support Opera?
>Of course Google has the resources. It's one of the biggest companies in tech.
I didn't say they lacked the resources, I said it wouldn't be fiscally prudent. They are not purposively preventing opera from working, they are just not fixing bugs that only show up in Opera.
>But it has very high market share in a few countries in Europe. Not supporting Opera is basically saying they don't support that country.
I call bananas. That is like saying they should support IE 6 because its popular in Korea and China, and unlike IE in Korea, there is not something stopping most users in that country from using something other than Opera (including firefox, and IE). Besides, it doesn't matter if 100% of a country uses Opera if that 100% represents less than 1% of their marketshare.
You are asking me if it is worth it, and I think they are basically telling you no, no it isn't.
Even 1% being tens of millions of users, and when there is a clear conflict of interest here (Google having a product competing with Opera), and the relatively very small amount of work needed to make it work on Opera - not to mention the bad publicity here?
If 1% ~= 10 million then that means their user base is nearly 1 billion, which clearly isn't true. There are not 1 billion people with a blogger blog.
There is no conflict of interest. They are not severing opera completely. just off of one section of one part of one of their services - one that is probably one of the lesser used ones at that.
Not to mention, they are not going to make it not work in Opera, they are just not going to fix opera specific bugs. that means that if they stick to the standards like they normally do, then this really shouldn't be that big of a problem, outside of esthetics.
I think this is the sum total of bad publicity. Honestly, Opera's biggest issue has been a lack of advocacy.
Didn't Google give up on IE6 for some of their services when it had less than 20% market share? Opera has 1-2% market share. Granted, it should be a lot easier to tweak their code for Opera, but the difference in market share is pretty big, too.
>Granted, it should be a lot easier to tweak their code for Opera
In fact, most things would just work in Opera as they do in the other browser if there weren't any Opera-specific sniffing code in place locking Opera out.
Even MS wanted IE6 dead. In this case, it is all about Google trying to force a very good browser that has brought in great ideas and features, in addition to the performance and standards compliance, out of the market.
> While Google has the resources to support Opera, it's not financially prudent to dedicate them to support a browser that barely has any market share.
Really? How much do you think it costs to make Blogger work on Opera?
Considering that Opera is religiously standards compliant, anything that renders properly on Chrome should also render properly on Opera. (Assuming Google isn't invoking some kind of undocumented chrome-specific functions we don't know about for some reason).
They can 'drop support', okay, fine, it's their choice what browsers they target. I just hope they don't start sniffing for the user agent and actively blocking it.
You're joking, I hope? Of course Google has the resources. It's one of the biggest companies in tech.
Not only does Google have the money to do it, but it really looks bad by not supporting Opera and telling people to use Chrome. Just to prevent that bad publicity it would be worth the money to just support Opera.
Furthermore, yes, Opera has low market share - a few percent globally. But it has very high market share in a few countries in Europe. Not supporting Opera is basically saying they don't support that country. Again, wouldn't it be worth the very small cost (in Google terms) to just support Opera?