Weekly Poll: Do You Use Opera?

In the world of browsers, fortunes can change terribly fast. If you browsed at all in the '90's, you surely used Netscape, at least for a time. Then IE 6 was the only game in town, while the cool kids started switching to Firefox. Apple's Safari came along, and while it didn't seem as important at first, it became the #1 way people browse from phones and tablets thanks to iOS. And Chrome, built on Safari's Webkit foundation, became the most popular browser. IE still has enormous marketshare, but it lost the mindshare long ago.

All along, in the background, Opera has been the alternate browser that everyone forgot about. It's 15th version just got released — now powered by Chrome's fork of Webkit, of all things — but it's still little more than a blip on web browsing statistics. It's had mobile versions for longer than iOS and Android have been around — I originally used it on a Nokia Symbian device, and later used it on a Windows Mobile 5.1 phone, far before the iPhone was around, much less had native apps.

And yet, it's never become a popular browser. But with Opera 15, more developers like Evernote are making browser extensions for it, and it could just possibly become a more popular browser — but the odds are against it.

That's why we're wondering if you use Opera, or if you used it in the past. We'd love to hear your thoughts about the European browser that won't quit in the comments below.