Opera 7.01b

[Walt_Crawford at notes.rlg.org]

One of my colleagues here raised an interesting question:

Who uses Opera? Does it have institutional support? Is there much of an
installed base?
(Or, to put it another way, what keeps them going?)

This isn't an attack--but, given Opera's default setting of "identify as
IE6.0," it's difficult to tell what Opera's user base is from any normal
statistics.

I suppose it would be significant here in that, if Opera had a substantial
market share, we might add it to the "intensively tested" set of browsers
for Eureka.

Since we just removed browser checking--that is, there's no longer any
condition under which access to the new Eureka is barred because of your
browser version--the flip side isn't an issue. Nor do there seem to be any
quirks in using Opera 7 with Eureka, based on my informal testing. And it
is fast! The browser, that is; the download was at dial-up speed.

[Well, I suppose there is one minor issue. By default, Opera7 puts up a
message box/confirmation request every time ANY form is sent without SSL or
equivalent. But people will learn to turn that off pretty rapidly.]

Anyway: any informed opinion on the actual user base for Opera would be
interesting.

-walt crawford, RLG, but my own opinions-