Key figures and statistics
What is Opera?
Opera is a lightweight, fast and robust browser first released in 1994. At first it was released as shareware but it was later made free but with ad display. Over the years Opera gained several interesting features like integrated email support, torrent client and ICQ chat. Some of the features were dropped over the years. For a more detailed history of Opera please see this wikipedia article.
Just how popular is Opera amongst other browsers?
According to both W3Counter and StatCounter.com Opera is currently the 5th most popular browser in the world. Let's compare those claims against 51Degrees data.
As the above graphs demonstrates: Opera is indeed the 5th most popular desktop browser worldwide and the 4th most popular browser amongst mobile devices. In fact Opera is even more popular than IE Mobile.
In what countries is Opera most popular?
When we look at the countries that use Opera the most, we get an interesting picture:
The desktop version of Opera is most popular in the US. Followed by China, Russia, Ukraine, France, Germany, Canada, Poland, UK and Vietnam.
Over 60% of all Opera mobile traffic originates in the US. It also appears that the mobile version of Opera is popular in both Asia and Africa.