Why is a boutique web browser so popular in Europe's last dictactorship? Opera's maximalist, ultra-fast caching keeps bandwidth use down when using crappy, metered internet. [The Atlantic]

  • http://twitter.com/incarnedine_v Dan Hibiki

    Better question is, what the hell is wrong with those countries that use IE?

    • dnebdal

      The biggest one is probably korea, where more or less everything involving online payment requires their weird local encryption system – that is only available as an ActiveX plugin.

  • Klaus Æ. Mogensen

    Opera has been my browser of choice for some years now (I have also used IE and Firefox and have tried Chrome briefly). I find that it is easy to use, quick to load pages, and has less waste ‘bar space’ around the edges than other browsers. There are a few pages it can’t load properly, but for those I use IE as backup.

    • https://launchpad.net/~zak-mckracken Zak McKracken

      Same here. I recently had to use another browser on someone else’s computer and I was soo baffled at all the crappy ads the internet has, of which I’ve been almost oblivious for a long time…
      Opera introduced tabbed browsing, private tabs, masking and a few other things to the market. Also it kept to HTML standards when the rest of the world was still fighting the Browser Wars. “Boutique” is not the word I’d use for it.
      That said, Opera seems to have problems with Disqus (or the other way round? I can’t post here using OpenID with Opera), which is why I mostly write comments like this one on a different browser.

      • Klaus Æ. Mogensen

        I write this comment in Opera – no problem.
        OTOH, I can’t download files from RPGNow in Opera, and a few other sites also give me problems.

  • http://twitter.com/nellydreadful Nelly Dreadful

    Hmm. Does Opera still save any bandwidth when using metered internet? I’m in an area of rural Canada where that’s pretty much all we got.

    • http://www.facebook.com/fred.talmadge.1 Fred Talmadge

       Rural Texas isn’t much better.

  • http://www.epinardscaramel.com TokenFrenchDude

    I didn’t know this use of “boutique”, thanks !
    Also, It’s a shame Opera doesn’t have more market shares.