Oh man, this is going to start a ‘you know what’ flinging contest in a hurry. Could this be accurate? Did they lie?

Opera Software seems to have decided that it’s easier lie that to win. Here’s the chain of events as best as I can tell.

PC World announced their 100 Best Products of 2005.

Firefox not only won the coveted Product of the Year award, sweeping all 99 other products in the list, but it beat out two other browsers, Maxthon at number 12 and Opera way down at number 88.

Opera puts out a press release claiming “A Winning Streak: Opera once again wins PC World’s World Class Award for best Web browser”. Opera.com then places this same thing on their front page (see the third checkbox with the claim that they’ve won best browser in ‘05.)

Conclusion: Opera is simply lying. They were one of 100 products to be labeled as “World Class” but they did not win any “best Web browser” anything. They were last in the ranking of three web browsers. They got beat by both Maxthon and Firefox. [Get the links]