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I'm going to up-vote this because it's a good talking point.

Developing for the web is hard, very hard because each browser brings to the table it's own set of bugs, inconsistencies and quirks. So for the most part, developers winnow down the list of browsers they **CHOOSE** to support as a cost-benefit analysis to ensure the site can be created reasonably fast, maintained reasonably well, and support the most users. It's a delicate balance of form, function, and compatibility. And if you support IE AND firefox then you are serving well over 90% of your visitors and potential visitors.

Developers MUST code to IE and Firefox. IE has 70% of the browser market, and Firefox has 25% with the opera/Safari/Konqueror niche making up the other 5%, roughtly speaking. So if you code to IE and FireFox you've covered 95% of your visitors.

While Opera is considered an A-Grade browser by Yahoo ( http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/index.html ), its insignificant marketshare means the onus is on them to provide full compatibility with IE and FireFox and since firefox is open source there's no excuse not to maintain at least full compatibility with Firefox. The onus isn't on web-developers to support Opera, it never has been, and it never will until Opera commands enough users to justify the investment in time and effort to develop for it.

There are always going to be niche, fringe, and specialty browsers (LYNX anyone?) but until they have a marketshare if there's a rant to be made, it's to the browser maker for not ensuring full compatability with Firefox and IE until they command enough of a marketshare to justify coding for the stuff they break in their implementations of the w3 specs :D

For the most part, Opera works reasonably well if you design a site first for firefox in mind and smoothing things out for IE6/7. Things only get funky if you get into really advanced page layouts where microspacing is an issue (I literally spent a day on a layout that would work in Firefox, then not in IE, then in IE but not in Opera, then in opera but neither firefox or IE worked -- argh!). It's this compatibility which has kept Opera in the running and because it's an easy check I usually have it running when I'm working on my site. But I consider Opera a bonus since less than 3% of my visitors use it...

Browsers Visits
Firefox 8,221 (64.32%)
Internet Explorer| 3,550 (27.78%)
Opera 369 (2.89%)
Safari 359 (2.81%)
Mozilla 164
Camino 49
Konqueror 24
Mozilla Compatible 22
Netscape 15
*Internet Explorer,gzip 2
Galeon 2
gecko,gzip 1
blackberry,gzip 1
SonyEricssonP900 1

Tech sites tend to skew Firefox over IE since those in the know avoid IE. But that should also provide a bump to other browsers as well but even if it doesn't boost Opera, you can still see where it's going to be ranking in the developer mindset.

Well personally as a web designer, I design for Firefox, Konqueror, IE 6/7 and Opera primarily, I am aware of browsers like Lynx, w3m and Dillo and I view my sites with them (Dillo renders pages similar to w3m). Most of the other browsers listed use Mozilla as the backend (Galeon, Epiphany, Camino) and Safari and Konqueror also render nearly the same. IE is the only butthead if you will that won't play nice with any of the other browsers or even other versions of itself. I find I can develop my site to look right on Mozilla, Konqueror and Opera, and then look at it with IE and it's all borked, I end up having to compromise the look on the other browsers in order to make it look good on IE, or at least write a special CSS file for IE browsers. I've not played with how to write pages for cellphone browsers as of yet, now would I even know how to start. I know I have to use Google's mobile tools in order to visit my own website using my Samsung A840, so that's that.. lol. Keep in mind the only real difference between the above browsers, is as i've seen, the Fonts, which is more of a client system specific thing. If everyone had the same Arial font installed it'd render the same, that way. But you've got 4 categories of browsers: Mozilla, Opera, KHTML, and IE. Design for those, and 95% of all visitors will see the site the same way.

"Keep in mind the only real difference between the above browsers, is as i've seen, the Fonts"
Let me clarify, once the page has been designed to work properly on the mentioned browsers.

Sure beats the old "there is only one browser" mindset...