I’m very pleased with my browsing habits at the moment. And I feel pretty much like a good citizen of the web for using these browsers in the following order.

Opera 9.5b2 90% - Makes me a Bugatti Veyron on the web. I want a state of the art web now. At least I’ll be ready for it if I use a state of the art browser.

Safari 3 5% - If a site don’t work in Opera, I’ll try in Safari. Besides; it’s fast and minimalistic. And aproximately as supportive of web standards as Opera. Which means it will be able to use state of the art web applications now.

Firefox 3% - If the site doesn’t work in Safari I’ll try in Firefox. It’s a bit quirky when it comes to web standards but still supports a lot of the upcoming web standards.

Internet Explorer 2% - The last resort. Only used in extreme and rare cases. Its poor support for web standards combined with a old monopoly means it keeps the web from undergoing a revolution in functionality in my humble but informed opinion.

Thank you very much! I’ve really enjoyed using Opera, and fully intend to in the future. Playing with the Kestral Beta so far has revealed a lot of really promising improvements.

Thanks for the dev tools link, I’ve signed up and can’t wait to find out more.

I have to say that finding sites which “block” Opera users are few and far between, but there are enough sites with the presumption to prevent certain browsers (typically rejecting Safari and Opera, and any text-only browsers) that it’s worth noting.

I’m hoping that within the next year that such practices will be almost totally abolished, and I think 9.5 will be a huge step towards bringing Opera desktop into the public eye on both the development and user end.

Time will tell!
Cheers,
~G

We’re glad to have you in the minority. We just released our new beta, which should improve even more on site compatibility. I personally don’t run into problems that often, unless the site blocks Opera. But even those blocking pages seem to be disappearing as more and more developers just choose to code according to standards.

But you’re right - it is definitely a two-way street between browser companies and developers. To that end, we’ll soon have some first-rate tools out (http://dragonfly.opera.com) that should help developers easily debug sites for all browsers.

Thanks for posting and thanks for sticking with us.

Thomas Ford
Opera

I use IE that 10% of the time for work–I’m lucky enough to have Firefox at work, but FTP sites don’t work in Firefox the way they do in IE (and the way I need them to work), and neither does one of our online products–though this is going to change soon, and then I’ll use Firefox about 93% of the time versus 7% for IE. I’ve tried using the IE tabs within Firefox, and an FTP plug-in, but they don’t work as cleanly as just using IE. Which is obnoxious, but since IE is the only browser that supports FTP, I guess I can’t complain too much.