I just read over at The Register that Opera's CEO is claiming they got over 60 million downloads of Opera 7. Just a couple of weeks ago, I read over at Reuters that Opera was claiming 10 million active users and 1% market share (that user to marketshare math seems reasonable to me.)
So here's my question: how is it that Firefox's 50 million downloads in six months translates to something between 8.6% and 10.28% of the market and Opera's 60 million downloads in the last two years translates to about 1% (according to both OneStat and Opera itself)?
I'm all too aware that downloads don't mean users and that users don't mean usage, but this looks like an awful big discrepancy.
Putting aside the usage/market share issue, the other question worth asking, if you're Opera Software or an Opera supporter, is what happened to those other 50 million users? 60 million downloads of Opera 7 and only 10 million active users of all Opera versions doesn't sound so good.
I know the Opera fans will think I'm just bashing here, but I'm not. I've been a dedicated Opera user in the past and I continue to use it for testing and occasionally try to use it for regular browsing. I've also offered what I believe to be reasonable criticism and proposals for making Opera better. If it is the case that the Firefox approach (a powerful, but clean and easy to use browser) is capable of turning 50 million downloads into ~10% market share, and the Opera 7 approach (a powerful, but somewhat difficult to use suite of internet applications) only ekes out 1% with 60 million downloads -- according to Opera itself -- then perhaps the Opera 8 move to cleaning up and simplifying the most important features, a clear move in Firefox's direction, will help to grow the Opera base going forward.
I believe that there's still a good bit of work to do in terms of Opera feature clean-up. Burying the rest of the suite was a good first step and I hope that Opera 8 continues to see good update and validates this move toward simplification.
