5 years back site compatibility was an serious issue with Opera but these days I rarely find a page that’s broken in Opera. I have Firefox too and tested these culprit sites and they gave the same error.
So for my fall back browser (like most people I guess) I use Internet Explorer.
Luckily most sites these days are working towards better web standard support so the falling back to iE we must do on all other browser will hopefully fade away.
So why do I use Opera? Well was the first browser I tried after IE back in the day and had a few months with Firefox back in version 2. Tested Firefox a few times since but couldn’t find decent addons to clone the features I grew attached too in Opera.
Chrome just feels too much of an effort to setup because its missing even more features I need and couldn’t bother to try and disable some of the stuff like page preloading.
Using Opera on my phone and ipad is also a big incentive to stay with them for the content sync between the devices.
A 2% share of the pie is still very big. Facebook have 800 million users and Opera roughly have 200 million(including mini/mobile of course). So having 25% the users of Facebook can’t be ignored ore sniffed at. So hopefully this will just increase and development will just continue to flourish in the future.