I don't buy the premise of the article at all. It looks to me like someone wondered about this, came with a reasonable hypothesis, but didn't bother testing it at all.<p>I lived in Romania where until Chrome came along Opera was the second most popular browser (lagging behind Internet Explorer). People used Opera because other people used Opera. It was as simple as that. When you saw someone using Internet Explorer, you installed Opera and told them to use that. Then they saw how it was better, so they did the same with their friends and so on. Only the most technical users considered a non-Opera browser.<p>Opera is a pretty good browser, and long time ago it was <i>the</i> best browser. If you have a large enough population of Opera users, it's easy to see how it can remain sustainable. The more interesting question is how did Opera became popular in the first place. This a question this article and the previous one on the same subject don't address.<p>I loved Opera. I bought a license back when it wasn't free. The user interface was fantastic, it was fast, it had minimal, but usable e-mail, bittorrent, and IRC clients, and it came with a decent ad blocker. It also ran on Solaris and OpenBSD. It had sync. At some point Firefox came, which had the potential, but it was slower than Opera, and required configurations to bring it to my liking and extensions to maintain and install. I hated that. I switched to Chrome only about a couple of years ago when a new major release of Opera was really, really unstable on Mac OS X when using flash. I like Chrome because I don't have to configure anything, just like with Opera, but I still feel the order in which Opera displayed tabs was superior and damn I miss the 1-2 key shortcuts for switching between tabs.
As pointed before, this was discussed a few days ago here (the original was on quartz.com, so is this like a "reblogged in theatlantic" thing?):<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4801782" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4801782</a><p>FWIW, this comment from that thread had many good insights.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804173" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804173</a><p>@4ad makes some good points (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4828181" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4828181</a>) in this thread. FWIW, I am reproducing my comment from that previous thread here.<p><i>Disclaimer: Long time Opera user and probably an Opera browser fan.<p>I have been using Opera since its "ad-supported" days. It was bundled with one of those PC magazines that gave out free software/shareware for the bandwidth challenged in those days (97/98-ish?), and fell in love instantly.<p>Opera is probably the most configurable, hackable and feature-full browser out there up to this day, and I still find things to configure and customise to this day (now on Opera 12.10). Opera also provides the user with an option to install itself as a portable version which I found very cool. It is also very light on PC resources (YMMV -- anecdata)<p>I also find it very annoying that a looot of websites do not support this browser.... at all despite its being on par (if not better) in most if not all browser tests (I heard they lagged behind on the most recent tests).<p>Opera Mini is blazingly fast on not-so-smartphones (used it on the Nokia ASHA series) and Android smartphones as well (anecdata -- my experience). It beats out Nokia's own browser which incidentally has adopted the "Turbo" architecture for its own browsers.<p>IMO the article does great disservice to Opera's technical/technological advanced capabilities by ignoring all of those and solely focussing the article around socialism and dictatorship and poor net connections in "those other countries" instead ( [almost] creating a straw-man in the process). Booo!</i>
Another factor is Opera's very low system requirements. In poorer countries people have less powerful hardware, not targeted by the big browser vendors.
One of the killer features to me for using Opera was a feature to browse with images turned off (cached images only) and a "show image" option on the right-click menu: coupled with extreme caching, it allowed to have a very tolerable browsing experience on very slow networks (mobile GRPS, etc).<p>Firefox misimplemented this feature by missing its point -- its "view image" opened the missing image in a new page -- instead of just loading it in its place in the page, and I'm not sure it used caching as good as well.
In Belarus (and I think in Russia as well), about 5 years ago, there used to be a promotion from mobile telecom providers, that if you used Opera on your cell-phone (i.e. Symbian, J2ME) you would get a free internet trafic. Ads were aired on radio, among other mediums. I dont remember details of those promotions though…
Among other reasons, this made quite a substantial contribution to Opera's current popularity.<p>Take this into account when thinking of a marketing strategy for your next hitech product ;)
I can say that Opera has been the #1 browser in Georgia (Republic Of) for many years. Now it's either 2nd or 3rd, after Chrome and IE.<p>Many teens still prefer Opera for unknown reasons here.
I don't know if anyone has mentioned one potential reason: Opera is the only browser which is clearly not made in the USA. For countries which aren't big fans of the US, this could have made quite a difference.
Opera was number one, two, or number three in Russia and in most of the CIS countries. I think the major reason was that it was pretty fast, and at that time most people had Internet access through a 56k modem. It was ad-supported, but nobody gave a bear about ads because of the extreme levels of piracy.
As someone slightly colorblind, it is almost impossible for me to distinguish Firefox and Chrome. With four things to show, even grayscale would have worked.<p>Here is the interactive map. Hover over countries to see percentages:
<a href="http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-monthly-201208-201210-map" rel="nofollow">http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-monthly-201208-201210-...</a>
The article puzzled me. I moved from Belarus in 2006, but back then Opera was just as marginal as anywhere else in the world.<p>I asked a bunch of my friends (IT professionals mostly), and it doesn't seem anything has changed. At this point I don't know what to think.
if I'm not mistaken, it's because of slower internet speeds in Belarus and Opera is pretty nice in the respect to having your browsing done on Opera servers and the response is archived and sent to the browser directly, saving some time and money.. but most people are not OK with this from a privacy standpoint in the US or Western Europe
> And although its competitors (especially Chrome) have now largely caught up, it also can't have hurt that Opera was an early leader in security features like encryption, useful in a police state.<p>What exactly are they referring to here?