Why is Opera losing this race? Is it the upswell of savvy users that followed the Mozilla story? Because Opera's been doing many of the things that people like about Firefox, and longer. I haven't found it significantly slower, and it's stable for me.

Yet it's barely a blip in the usage numbers.

Maybe it's the name, maybe the lack of massive promotion, maybe something else, I dunno. I wonder if there are any articles on the subject.

I think Firefox's roots that reach back to Netscape probably have a lot to do with it.

I only discovered recently that Opera was now free.

I haven't found it significantly slower

I have, at least on my old Windows machine. And back when I originally switched to Firefox, the lack of banner ads was a big plus.

[eta:

I think Firefox's roots that reach back to Netscape probably have a lot to do with it.

Actually, for me, the Netscape roots were what kept me from switching for a pretty long time. I've always found Netscape (and Mozilla) clunky and irritating to use. Opera was the first browser I ever really liked.]

I only discovered recently that Opera was now free.

I think I paid for it once, and I've been using it since it fit on a floppy. It has very non-intrusive advertising (in fact, I need to upgrade this machine to the free version, but I'm so amused by the context-sensitive ads that I keep forgetting to).

I wouldn't say it has a bad rap -- more like no rap. And certainly no geek cred. But it's had moveable tabs and the like for forever.

Makes me sad, because I figure with everyone designing for IE, Firefox and maybe Safari, compatibility will force me to give it up. Don't wanna.

I have a new Linux Distribution I really like. PCLinuxOS. I set it up on my secondary home computer and never had to use a command line to configure anything. Not sure about the KDE thing though.

For me, it's mostly just that I tried it once, long ago, and hated it. It wasn't really cross-platform, it still had ads on top, and it didn't display web pages very accurately. Oh, and I couldn't compile it from source, which was a big deal for me in my linux stage. I found Firefox at some point, was impressed, and have been sticking with it (mostly) ever since.

I actually use Camino on my Mac, as it uses native widgets. Does Opera? Maybe I'll try it out again. At the same time, I don't really need an integrated mail client - I use gmail exclusively these days - but I don't really mind having it. Also, I can't help but think that they'll either put ads back on top or start charging for it eventually, something I can be sure will never happen if I stick with the Firefox.

My Dell Digital Jukebox went belly-up last week. I'm trying to decide what to replace it with (Dell doesn't sell Jukeboxes in Australia). Obviously, my biggest concern is that I can continue to play all the music I recorded from my CDs (using Musicmatch) and downloaded from the internet (using Musicmatch). I'd be interested in getting an iPod, but my understanding is that its music format is incompatible. Is this correct? Does anyone know what I need to look for in a music box?

Apple has its own format (AAC) that the iTunes Music Store uses, but iPods can also play mp3s just fine, and iTunes can be set to record CDs in mp3 instead of AAC.