

Russians Love Opera Browsers, Has The 2nd Highest Share In The Country - adeelarshad82
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2386723,00.asp

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bluekeybox
> It's a bit of a mystery, but surely if nearly a third of Russian web surfers
> have made it their default it just might be time for the rest of the world
> to take it for a test drive

I can shed some light on this "mystery". Shortly after moving to the U.S. in
the year 2000, I noticed that a number of my computer-literate friends who
remained in Ukraine (which is where I was from) were using Opera browser. They
were "hacker" types -- the kind, if they were from the U.S., you would expect
to be using Mozilla/Firefox on Linux (I was switching between Mozilla and
Konqueror on Linux at the time). However, nearly all of them were running
Opera on Windows instead. I remember thinking that this stemmed from the fact
that the "open-source" culture originated in the West and was slow to spread
to the former Soviet block because of network effects and because of the ease
with which Windows could be pirated in the 2nd world. Meanwhile, Russian
hackers, not being entirely stupid, quickly concluded that MS Internet
Explorer is not the best browser out there and switched to an alternative --
which happened to be Opera. Had the open source culture been more prevalent in
Russia at the time, they would have chosen Firefox. The current popularity of
Opera in those countries is probably entirely due to network effects
originating from those early adopters.

