21–30 of 53 posts
Well, what about them? Are they realistically going to be your customers?
For many many sites it really doesn't matter if they don't support 3rd world countries - what value do we gain from working hard to support people with no money to spend? Advertisers aren't interested in them, we can't sell anything to them. It sounds selfish but society is based on exactly that way of thinking.
If thousands of users are desperately trying to use your site everyday even when it's broken for them then I'd wager the business is missing out on profit. Our company sell to developing countries too, and there's definitely money to be made. If you don't want to support people who you automatically assume have no money to spend, go ahead and leave it on the table for us to collect. :)
Not really. They might be perusing your e.g. news site for information, but wouldn't click in any ad anyway (and maybe, because of Opera Mini, they don't even see them).
It's not the browser which is breaking the site; it's the site's developers who are using features which are not universally available. Guess what? If you use simple, clean HTML and progressively enhance with JavaScript, CSS and HTML5 features then everyone can browse your site. Or you can use the absolute bleeding edge of everything, requiring every user to give your code a full VM on his machine (a JavaScript VM, g…
The users don't want a site. They want an app. It's like expecting the developers of the latest, greatest PC game to write a progressively enhanced game that the same executable will run on DOS 1.0 all the way to the latest Windows version. They will spend time and resources on making sure it works with DOS 1.0, even though there are next to zero users for it, making it completely uneconomical, basically working for…
The trend today is that sites are crashing my up-to-date Firefox browser[1] because they need a ton of Javascript to get the layout right.
I don't mind a fancy site but just let me get the information I need.
[1] I own a not so new smart phone that does the job well for everything else.
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You really can't compare both.
Um, why not?
Opera Mini doesn't render webpages, it's all done server side. What's sent to the browser is a pile of highly compressed layers containing text and images and some metadata about what's clickable - and that's it. From HTML, JS and CSS point of view Opera Mini is a highly optimized, non-real time remote desktop client.
I've heavily used J2ME Opera Mini on my S40 dumbphones many years ago. Back then it was awesome. Today, when the only way to keep sanity when browsing the web on desktop is using NoScript, I doubt that using it would be as awesome as it was back then, and that's not really Opera Mini fault. After all, when using Opera Mini, you don't expect everything to work and render as it would on desktop browser - as long as content is shown and can be accessed properly, it's fine. However, in a world where crazy people use SPA frameworks for their blogs, it cannot be taken for granted.
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If thousands of users are desperately trying to use your site everyday even when it's broken for them then I'd wager the business is missing out on profit. Our company sell to developing countries too, and there's definitely money to be made. If you don't want to support people who you automatically assume have no money to spend, go ahead and leave it on the table for us to collect. :)
That's the politically correct way to look at it but I don't think you're right. With the advent of the $30 smartphone, by the time these countries have disposable income that you can indirectly or directly profit from, its likely that one of their first purchases is a better phone with a capable browser. Until then they're a waste of time and resources. On Black Friday you could get a Moto E, unlocked and off contra…
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The reason many users are using Opera Mini is to use less data and to load pages faster. An app won't scratch that itch. -posted using Opera Mini
Chrome on Android offers proxy compression too
The truth is, there is always going to be some subset of users/agents that won't be able to use your site. You won't reach everyone, not only for technical reasons but for cultural and linguistic reasons as well. Even if you make your stuff work in Opera Mini, who's to say the user on the other end reads one of the languages your site is available in.
The only thing left is to decide the tradeoff between how many of them, the experience itself, and the amount of work you will spend maximizing the other two. There is something about the web that makes a certain portion of people want to believe that tradeoff doesn't exist, and you're a jerk if your site doesn't work on everyone's toaster in Moldova.
That's a feature and not a bug, as many examples. Opera Mini is is designed to bring you 95% of the web for 20% of the data. This is one trade-off.
So are many other things, like CSS-Animations. Opera Mini only displays "frozen" pages and I love it.