Why is Belarus the only country where Opera is the most popular browser? | Hacker News Reader

Why is Belarus the only country where Opera is the most popular browser?

theatlantic.com

46 pointsHerrMonnezza44 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Off-topic:

But I consider all those softwares you mentioned to be (still) bloody good at what they do too. So, why bother changing? ;-)

Norton Commander was awesome on MS DOS. Simple and elegant, yet powerful.

As for RAR - 95% of the time (emailing attachments), Zip would work just fine, especially on the receiving end, without forcing the recipient to install anything.

Don't you find RAR's compression ratio better? Besides one can use 7zip or peazip to open the RAR files anyway.

Nokia also does not seem to realise that it has a lot of customer goodwill in many, many countries. I wish and hope they do not squander it away.

I use zip because it's ubiquitous, but I use WinRAR to manage my zip archives because it's so much better than any other tool on Windows.

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!

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).

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.

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.

Many teens still prefer Opera for unknown reasons here.

Also true of Kazakhstan until recently.

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

> Many teens still prefer Opera for unknown reasons here.

This demographic trend in true in many places.

One reason could be that Opera offers an unprecendented level of hackability and configurability (for a closed source browser) that in turn gives teens a "I am soo much in control of this whole browsing experience thing" feeling?

(Correct me if I am wrong) :-)

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.

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.

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

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".

It does not make a difference.

And you're wrong if you think that Belarus people transfer Lukashenko opinions about USA on software/hardware.

Disclosure: I am Russian, we opened a filial in Minsk this year. Belarus have a lot of skilled programmers. Not code monkeys, a lot of them high qualified, very opinionated. A lot of them have experience in international firms.

   I suppose you've heard about World of Tanks.

   The same goes for Kiev/Ukraine programmers, although I did not have experience with them.

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.

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.

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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4801782

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.

If you feel that it is not enough you could have added 'Dupe/more discussion' as you see fit. As it is your comment doesn't improve on the situation.

Typically a lone link referencing another HN thread is a dupe link or a place where there is more discussion on the same subject. I'll be more careful next time.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I believe aioprisan was referring to the Opera Turbo feature that was introduced to the desktop version of Opera a while back.

Forgot about that thing, I stand corrected.

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

I stand corrected.

Opera Mobile is still my primary browser on my iPhone. It is a good[1] browser and fast on 3G.

1] If you don't mind your traffic going through Opera.

There are no Opera Mobile for iPhone, only Opera Mini.

EDIT: Someone else also pointed this. Apologies for multiple posting.

No. Opera Turbo was and is still a very desktop feature, and it does significantly speeds the browsing experience. They have moved this convenience/feature over to their mobile offerings.

Opera Mini is the pre-smartphone browser (Very good IMO)

Opera Mobile is their Android offering (Very good IMO)

Well, my ISP provides 100Mbps Ethernet semi-unlimited connection for about $20/mo. (Though, it doesn't even cover entire capital city of Minsk.) And semi-/fully-unlimited ADSL connections at speed of 5Mbps cost around $10/mo. Not so expensive, either.

3G internet is a different story, though, my carrier provides 3Gb data plan for $10/mo.

It's just that for people with average salary of $500, it might be costy.

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

Never heard of the peer effect?)

> 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?

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