Opera to Put User's Face in Times Square

An anonymous reader writes "Opera has announced that they will be putting one lucky user's face up in Times Square during the New Year's Eve celebrations. The ABC SuperSign will display the winner of of Opera's most recent contest that only requires a submission of your picture and the reason why you should be chosen as their New Year's mascot. Nearly one million partygoers will witness the super sized fan tribute with the Opera browser logo on the 585 square foot (that's 54 square meters!) screen."

Re:Here's my entry

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. I don't really get this either. On my iBook Safari ships with the OS and is just a joy to use *and* it's based on an OSS engine. All of the good.
"A joy to use" is subjective. And OSS is more important to some people than to others.

On other OSen. I use Firefox. OSS, works really well, and has everything I want.
Firefox has everything you want because you installed lots of extensions. They often conflict with each other, are incompatible with newer versions, or plain don't work.

I just don't get Opera. It doesn't come with anything.
Opera comes with a web browser, database-driven (read: fast) mail client (POP and IMAP), RSS feeder, Usenet reader, IRC client, and note taker.

It's harder to install than Firefox on Linux and OpenBSD.
Both Opera and Firefox are available as tarballs, debs, and rpms.

Not as good as Safari on OS X and on windows well I just don't get why I'd want to trade one fully closed browser for another.
Again, this is a matter of taste. I happen to love Opera's speed and innovation.

Also I've yet to have anybody tell me what it brings to the party that Firefox doesn't.
It's all integrated, so you don't have to shuffle between Firefox and your mailer. It's significantly faster at rendering pages and going back and forth. The mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts are to die for. The interface is customizable; not so with Firefox.

Only thing I wish is that all of the above would use Konq's cookie management code. But the majority of people would likely disagree with me on that. (Note that I'm *not* a KDE user but the few times I've used it I've been really impressed by Kong's default cookie settings.)
I think you'll find Opera's cookie handler comparable.

Re:and then what? they'll usurp firefox?

[worb]

I'm hesitant to reply to this troll and give it more exposure than it needs, but on the other hand, a few corrections/different points of view probably won't hurt...

"the big banner should just say, "we used to cost money, but now we're free even though many web sites don't display properly,"

That is true for all non-IE browsers. Until v1.5 Firefox couldn't even display the old Slashdot correctly, but you often had to refresh to make it work properly.

"but do note that we invented lots of cool ideas that were adopted by all of our competitors and most people don't know this but most of our core marketing team is in the southern USA area"

Opera Software is based on Norway (Northern Europe).

"and also we have this mobile browser accelerator that nobody even really uses much because it only works on like ten phones"..."

Not sure what this is all about, but Opera Mini [opera.com] works on most phones available today.

"and the winner of this contest will be: ideally thin, caucasian and with a hip "opera user look" that the company can deploy in a larger integrated campaign. mark my words: no fat people, burn victims or others in that category of "couldn't work for abercrombie" will win..."

Let's see what happens. Opera isn't exactly known to do it the traditional way. Heck, the CEO doesn't even allow himself a big fat pay check even though he certainly deserves it. He could have been a millionaire, but drives around in a rusty old car.

"in fact, my guess is that the winner will be employed by either starbucks or abercrombie, age 22-26, female (tech influencers right now), shoulder length hair that's dark, thin and with a natural look light on cosmetics and wearing only solid colors on the billboard because it will create better contrast with the opera logo..."

Actually, the person will be chosen based on submissions posted on the my.opera.com community site. They will not choose a professional model, since this isn't Opera's style. See above about how even the CEO is really down to earth.

They don't like to brag, so this marketing campaign is really unlike Opera to begin with, so my guess is that they'll choose someone who looks decent enough, but probably not someone who could have been a model anyway. Just an average person who doesn't make Opera look really bad.

Basically, this is meant as a "thanks" to the community that's been supporting Opera through all these years. Opera just turned 10, remember.

Oh well, this probably won't get through since bashing Opera seems to be the popular thing to do these days...

Re:Here's my entry

[Aranth Brainfire]

You can't simultaneously say it is harder to install than firefox AND say that it doesn't have any features Firefox doesn't have. To get 75% of Opera's features in Firefox, you have to install an extension. And unless you already know exactly what extensions you already want, this process takes time (and is annoying as heck, in my opinion).

If you actually want to know what features Opera brings, visit http://opera.com/features/ [opera.com] and look around a bit. Nobody really cares enough (I hope) to waste their time recompiling a list for you.

For me, it really just boils down to the philosophies behind them. Use Firefox if you really care that much about everything being open source or fiddling with your browser. Use Opera if you really don't care and just want something that works with advanced features.

Re:Screen Resolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Typically, large video displays have lower resolution than you might think. For example: The physical pixel size of the Samsung display in Times Square is ~500px X ~600px

You'd actually be pretty amazed how good something can look at such a low res.