
Why is Belarus the only country where Opera is the most popular browser? - HerrMonnezza
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/why-is-belarus-the-only-country-where-opera-is-the-most-popular-browser/265406/
======
4ad
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.

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.

Opera is a pretty good browser, and long time ago it was _the_ 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.

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.

~~~
photorized
You wrote: "People used Opera because other people used Opera".

I am originally from Russia and my wife is from Belarus, and I can tell you
that's very common in former Soviet Republics. They just pick a software
package and stay with it, e.g. Norton Commander/FAR Manager instead of command
line or built-in OS file managers, RAR instead of Zip etc etc. I believe this
mainly has to do with user mentality than the qualities of the product itself.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
That's true in any country, and in any industry. Momentum is hugely important,
and us hacker types tend to forget that. While we love to try new things out
and always ready to switch, most people are content with the things they use,
the things they regularly buy, and will only switch if social pressure compels
them to.

~~~
photorized
Social pressure, exactly. And in countries like Russia, it's much harder to
manipulate it. They love their Livejournal and vk.ru, and their Nokia phones
(sometimes to a fault - Nokia is closing all stores in Russia), and they don't
use Google or Facebook. Google tried and failed, now FB is trying. And
Zuckerberg won't be able to solve this one, without some M&A.

Fascinating.

~~~
joonix
Why is Nokia closing their stores there if they've been so successful?

------
Surio
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?):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4801782>

FWIW, this comment from that thread had many good insights.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804173>

@4ad makes some good points (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4828181>) in
this thread. FWIW, I am reproducing my comment from that previous thread here.

 _Disclaimer: Long time Opera user and probably an Opera browser fan.

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.

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)

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).

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.

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!_

------
Strshps1MoreTim
Another factor is Opera's very low system requirements. In poorer countries
people have less powerful hardware, not targeted by the big browser vendors.

------
noswi
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).

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.

------
ksaitor
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.

Take this into account when thinking of a marketing strategy for your next
hitech product ;)

------
ochekurishvili
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.

Many teens still prefer Opera for unknown reasons here.

~~~
petercooper
Also true of Kazakhstan until recently.

~~~
4ad
In Romania it was never number the primary browser, but it was second, after
Internet Explorer. Then Chrome came and overtook both.

------
ivix
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.

~~~
cromulent
It might be interesting to see what happens in Russia with the recently
released Yandex browser. After 3 weeks it had 1.8% market share, according to
Wikipedia.

~~~
bla2
Since Yandex browser is for the most part Chromium, it's made in the US too.

~~~
cromulent
Depends what you mean by "made". I'm not sure that you can say that open-
source projects like Chromium, Webkit, KHTML etc are "made in the US".

------
toksaitov
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.

~~~
ksaitor
yeah! I remember easy cache control was a popular feature. Many people would
make sure that all pictures are cached and not reloaded. Especially in times
when social networks with tons of photos came along… And this was a typical
thing that many ppl were aware of and using, not even counting geeks.

------
mertd
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.

Here is the interactive map. Hover over countries to see percentages:
[http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-
monthly-201208-201210-...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-
monthly-201208-201210-map)

------
jacquesm
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4801782>

~~~
markokocic
Just a link without a clue what is it about doesn't help too much. All one can
see from the link itself is that points to article with id 4801782 on hacker
news.

~~~
zorlem
An explanation for the link: A link to a previous discussion on HN about
pretty much the same article. The original link is to Quartz and the article
is by Tim Fernholz, so I guess it's reprinted by "The Atlantic". In the
Atlantic version it's even stated at the top "TIM FERNHOLZ - Tim Fernholz is a
reporter at Quartz."

Meta: I don't know why you've been downvoted, I find your complain perfectly
valid. Maybe the reason is that the only thing you did is complain and
decrease the S/N ratio.

------
varjag
The article puzzled me. I moved from Belarus in 2006, but back then Opera was
just as marginal as anywhere else in the world.

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.

------
mkup
Because Opera has a mode to bypass government firewalls? (Opera Turbo)

------
aioprisan
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

~~~
4ad
That's Opera Mobile, _the_ mobile browser in pre-smartphone era. The desktop
version is a different product that works just like any other browser. It used
to be the "fastest", like chrome is "fast" today, but I believe it has been
surpassed by Chrome in this regard.

~~~
luchs
You mean Opera Mini, Opera Mobile is a regular mobile web browser, just as the
default Android browser etc.

~~~
4ad
I stand corrected.

------
captn3m0
I read this using Opera Mini on my feature-phone. It does offer money savings,
that I can vouch for.

------
dschiptsov
Never heard of the peer effect?)

------
drivebyacct2
> 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.

What exactly are they referring to here?

