As one blogger points out, Opera’s minimal success is difficult to understand, because Opera is filled with innovative and useful features, yet it has no where near the adoption of Firefox. The blogger’s explanation is that the user interface and experience is too different from Firefox and IE, and therefor not appealing to new users. While this may in part be true, I believe that openness is the key difference that prevents adoption. By openness, I mean the ability to customize the browser to be what you want it to be. Firefox accomplishes this on multiple levels. First of all, everyone is encouraged to write extensions (and a lot of people do.) These extensions are enough for most people to customize their browser to be anything they can think of. (Skins should be mentioned too, but Opera has those.) At the base of this ability of customize Firefox is that it is an open-source project. You can’t get any more customizable or flexible than that.

The author of the post mentioned above dismisses these differences as not things the average user would care about, but I think this misses a key point. Firefox is mostly spread through word of mouth, originating at tech-savvy users who care enough to do the research. These tech-savvy users tell their friends to use whatever browser they like and soon enough their friends are telling their friends and so on. In this way, some one who has no idea what an “extension” is or what “open-source” is may be using Firefox because it is open-source.

There is no reason this should only apply to Opera and Firefox. This same reasoning can be used with almost any piece of software. If you can think of any more examples of this, go ahead and post them in the comments!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Linux Applications, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.