If you’ve been using the Opera web browser for awhile now, you’ll probably remember that Opera added widgets with the release of Opera 9.0.  Less than a year later, they have officially met an impressive milestone, with the 1,000th widget becoming available.  For those unaware, widgets are external add-ons to a browser.  Because Opera comes with most of the necessary features built in to it, their widgets can add functionality outside of the browser itself.  You can find some of the most popular widgets here.

Based off the last figures I saw, it seems that Opera had roughly a 1% market share while Firefox has in the 12-15% range.  While you can’t directly compare widgets to Firefox extensions, I believe Firefox currently has roughly 3,000 extensions available.  The fact that Opera is over 1,000 widgets in much less time shows how great their community is, based off the number of users.

Congrats Opera on the milestone!