Re: Opera Users

G'day.

> It'll depend on the program that's gathering the statistics.
> Even when masquerading as IE or as Netscape, Opera includes the string
> "Opera" in there. So a program that looks for "Opera" as well as "MSIE"
> can differentiate between Opera and IE. I have no idea whether or not
> most statistics gatherers are doing this correctly.

I'd say most don't do it correctly.  Some of my clients have a hosting
account with live statistics server.  Looking at its reports and comparing
it with actual figures fro the log files, the figures are totally wrong.
It's simple to detect, but I'd say a lot of stats programs stop looking
through the browser tags as soon as they see "Mozilla", "Netscape" or "MSIE"

Not just talking about Opera here.  Stats on one of my clients' sites showed
a LOT of visitors were running AOL4.  Like the vast majority.  Turns out
anything that had AOL in the browser tag, plus Mozilla 4, was reported as
AOL4.  Most of them turned out to be AOL 5 or 6, drien by MSIE 5 or 5.5

Nobody appeared to be using MSIE6 and a huge number used Netscape 4 (like
25% or more - nonsense).  Log files showed it to be otherwise.  Seems MSIE6
was also lumped in with Netscape 4 as the browser tag starts with
Mozilla/4.0 (chalk and cheese!).  Real numbers of Netscape 4.xx were more
like 4% after closer examination.  Still too high for my liking, but less of
a coding worry than 25%

Opera6 has 5 options as to how it will identify itself but looking a the
UserAgent with Javascript they all have Opera near the end of the tag.  So
it CAN be detected.  Just like AOL browsers can be detected.  Just depends
on the order in which you gather the stats.

> As far as I know, Opera users are still a tiny segment of the internet.
> I'd guess that Netscape 4 users still outnumber them by a wide margin.

Most likely.  Netscape 4 is/was free (as is the new version). Opera is not.
You either end up wasting bandwidth on annoying flashing ads or you have to
pay for it.  And while its CSS support (even in Version 4) is a darn sight
better than Netscape 4, its JavaScript support is patchy.  Hmm, we can turn
that off.  And a lot of other "annoying new-fangled technology".  But we've
had that thread :-)

Regards
--
Bert Doorn, Web Developer
CIW Associate, IWA Member
www.betterwebdesign.com.au
Fast Loading, User Friendly Websites

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