opera
When the Mozilla foundation bought a two-page advertisement in The New York Times in 2004 for its rising star, the Firefox web browser, popularity was the message they chose to emphasize:

Find out what more than 10 million users from around the world already know: there is an alternative!

After authenticity one of the most effective messages a brand can send is popularity. When choosing between two restaurants, one empty and one crowded, all other things being equal most people choose the crowded restaurant.

One of the oldest web browsers on the market is the Opera web browser. Despite being renown for innovation, it was the first major browser to include tabbed browsing and ad-blocking, Opera has never quite caught on.

One factor which might have contributed to this fact is so-called “agent-spoofing”, when browsers such as Opera pretend to be Internet Explorer.

Opera, a browser that had been around for years prior to Firefox, stayed at around 1% while Firefox soared to more than 20% market share. One reason for this was that lots of Opera users identified themselves as Internet Explorer users. There were no statistics for the blogosphere or media to get excited about, because Opera users were below the radar. And Firefox’s popularity begat more popularity.

Recently, the agent-spoofing feature of Opera has changed and market-share statistics are more accurate. If the feature would have been disabled sooner, who knows, I might have been using Opera to write this post.