Necessary to support Opera?

Im doing cross browser testing and im struggling to get Opera working. As it has such a small mark开发者_C百科et share and its somewhat of a specialist tool, is it necessary to fully support Opera? I dont use it (other than for testing) so i dont know if lots of sites dont fully work with it.

Thanks

I don't class Opera as a specialist tool whatsoever, and it's dominance in the mobile market is also something you should be aware of. More and more people are using Opera every day, and it's standards support is still unrivaled (for the most part).

If you can't get your site working in Opera then there is, 99.999% of the time, something fundamentally wrong with your markup that should be fixed in any case. Also, despite what most people say, I find it very difficult to find a site that doesn't work in Opera.

I personally think that you should try to fix your issue, I'm sure with the help of SO members this wouldn't be too much of a chore ;-)

Well if you take a look at this statistic it shows that opera is getting more known and popular since 2002, maby not that fast but it still growing. I'm one of the people who used to use opera before and it has some realy nice features, but since they got bigger its not as fast as before, but it supports the maskerading to FF and IE.

I would support it if its not such a big Issue, AFAIK opera can interprete valid HTML pretty well doesnt it?

"Necessary" depends in part on the usage statistics of the demographic you're targeting - but note that this is also a "chicken and egg" issue: if you block Opera or the site has clear problems, Opera users will probably go elsewhere and as a percentage of your users, Opera will seem safe to ignore - and very few if any of those users will get in touch to tell you that they took their traffic and business elsewhere. So blocking or warning against Opera is a self-fulfilling course of action that will keep the share of Opera-using visitors low and your site will loose a fairly interesting audience (internet-savy, likes trying out new things, technically above average..).