What a day

Oslo, Norway – December 17, 2010

A little more than a year ago, we launched Opera 10.10. We were stunned to see an average of 1,7 million downloads per day the first week. In fact in our own words: “This download rate shatters previous Opera records.”

Bacon proves to be most important viral marketing tool

What a difference a year makes. Yesterday, Opera 11 was downloaded a total of 6,7 million times with 1,1 millions coming from download partners around the globe.

What about auto-update, you say? There’s no question that auto-update does help download numbers, as it should. We want people using the newest version and we want to make it easy for them to get it. Still, not every single person using Opera’s desktop version received the auto-update message. 50 million downloads all at once might, at worst, rip a hole in the fabric of space-time, sending our offices hurtling into a parallel universe where toasters fly and everyone uses MS Bob. Or it might just make the downloads really slow. Either way, we aren”t taking chances.

A survey of people downloading Opera for the first time had 53% of its respondents coming from Firefox, and 43% coming from IE.

We didn’t do this alone. It took a lot of help from all of you to make it happen. That’s the way it’s always been at Opera. So thank you. Thank you for downloading Opera. Thank you for sharing it with your friends. Thank you for believing that an independent browser fighting to make the Web a better place is an idea worth supporting.

Or was it the bacon?