Opera is planning on releasing a new, hmm… how should I put it, well let’s just say that Opera is about to announce something really cool on June 16th.

The company is framing this new ‘thing’ as ‘Reinventing the Web.’ I’m excited about it; it definitely has the potential to be a game changer (for some).

Opera’s hint: We start our little story with the invention of the modern day computer. Over the years, the computers grew in numbers, and the next natural step in the evolution was …

www.opera.com/freedom

I had a nice laugh this morning when I popped open www.opera.com — A 90’s website to celebrate the 15 year anniversary of the Opera desktop browser. Nice.

A screenshot of www.opera.com on April 28th, 2009

It looks like Mozilla is also going after Microsoft’s Internet Explorer through the EU courts.

According to Cnet, Mozilla has been granted a seat at the table in the European Commission’s antitrust case against Microsoft.

“Mozilla requested and was granted “third-party status,” which entitles the organization behind the popular Firefox browser to receive access to confidential documents in the case and the ability to voice objections”

As you may recall Opera filed a complaint with the European Commission to force Microsoft to make significant changes to Internet Explorer back in December of 2007.

On its Core blog, Opera posted some of the details of its new JavaScript engine, called Carakan.

The new engine, which likely won’t be available in the upcoming Opera 10 release, is 2.5 times faster than the Opera 10 alpha engine, according to Opera.

All the details are up on the Core blog and the short Carakan FAQ they posted.

My observation:
My guess is that Opera decided to put much effort into making its JavaScript engine faster not for bragging purposes, but rather for its increasingly popular embedded browser and SDKs in devices and mobile phones.

Opera, of course, is going full force in promoting Opera Widgets for devices and mobile phones as a way to build web applications that are platform independent and that are cheap to build (using plain old HTML and JavaScript). By improving its JavaScript engine, it is directly improving the performance of Opera Widgets.

My old buddy Phillip Gronvold, who works at the Opera office in the US, demonstrated Opera Mini on the new Google Android phone to digi.no.

Watch the video (only the very beginning is in Norwegian, the rest is in English)

(Via ChooseOpera)

Related: The story behind Opera Mini on Google Android

In its third quarter financial results Opera revealed that it now has 30 million users of its desktop Opera browser. Nice.

For those of you keeping score at home, the usage is up by 40% since the end of 2007 and 55% in the past 12 months.

Some other desktop stats for you: Usage of the desktop browser in Russia, where Opera apparently has a 25% market share, has grown by 112% in the past 12 months, while Indonesia has grown by 115%.

Opera Mini, on the other hand, had 21 million users in October.

The Opera desktop team today released the first beta of the Opera 9.6 browser.

Major new features include a nicer preview of RSS feeds and a ‘Low bandwidth mode’ for the Opera Mail client. In addition, the typed url history can now also be synchronized between various Opera browsers using Opera Link.

The new RSS feed preview allows you to preview the feed before giving you the option to subscribe to it with Opera’s built-in feed reader. This is certainly an upgrade from the previously unstyled feeds, though I hope Opera will also include some links to subscribe using other feed readers, such as Google Reader and Bloglines (FeedBurner already does this).

Read the changelog
Download Opera 9.6 beta

The Marriott is now recommending visitors to its mobile website to download and use the Opera Mini browser. Nice!

(Via: WapReview.com)

Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner doesn’t seem to concerned with the newly launched Google Chrome browser. In fact he finds it kind of flattering that Google is copying many of Opera’s innovative features, such as Speed Dial.

The media rounds
Opera boss: Imitation is flattering – The Register
Google Chrome ‘borrows’ from Opera browser – PC Advisor

Opera’s founder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner posted his thoughts on the Choose Opera blog about new Google Chrome browser, which was released yesterday.

Read: Choice in the browser industry – By Jon von Tetzchner

Columnist Andrew Brown, of The Guardian, wrote a nice column yesterday about why he’s switching back to Opera from Firefox 3.

“With the release of Firefox 3, I mounted a private celebration: I went back to using Opera 9.5 as my main browser. This wasn’t just perversity. Firefox without its add-ons is clearly inferior to Opera. Firefox with enough add-ons to make it really useful is very much slower. And Opera has one advantage over all the competition which is enough to outweigh all its other faults to me.”

(Read the entire column)

- Hat tip: Keith Rapado

The day has finally come. Opera’s Core team joined the blogosphere with its ‘Opera Core Concerns’ blog.

The Core team at Opera is responsible for the fundamental core of the Opera browser. It’s the rendering engine (and more). It’s what makes it possible for Opera to easily build their browser across all different platforms and devices.

Here’s how the Core team describe themselves:

“What we call “Core” at Opera refers to the platform-independent internal components of our browser. Opera delivers web browsers on more than a dozen different operating systems and platforms, on devices ranging from state of the art desktop computers via game consoles and TVs down to handheld devices with fairly limited processing power. The same Core code base is used across the entire product range. This enables us to deliver the same feature set and level of standards support regardless of the target device.

Being part of Opera for the past couple years, I’ve come to recognize the smart developers and engineers of the Core team. They are folks who truly know and work with the nitty gritty details of Web standards and core browser technology.

What I’d like to see them blog about
Ideally, I’d like to see the Core team blog turn into Hallvord’s blog, but on steroids. Hallvord, who does Core QA at Opera, regularly dissects the issues and problems with sites that don’t play well with Opera.

I’d like to see the Core team blog ‘regularly’ blog about and explain the issues (and solutions) that Opera has with certain sites. The benefits for such kind of blogging are enormous.

1. It creates an open dialog with the Web developers working on those broken sites. Fixing the problems will probably be placed on a higher priority.
2. Not only does it create an open dialog with the developers of those sites in question, it also opens the door wide for the Web developer community and gives them access to our Core engineers.
3. By highlighting the actual reasons of why certain sites break or don’t work in its browser, people won’t view Opera as a sub-par, deficient browser, but rather place the blame on broken code and the developers working on those sites.

In addition, I’d like to see the Core team blog about the enhancements and fixes that are made to the Core code. When new desktop builds are made public, the Desktop team generally brushes over only some of the many items in the ‘Core’ changelogs. I’d like to see the Core blog complement those changelogs.

My hope
I sincerely hope the Core blog will have fresh and interesting content on a regular basis, and that it won’t fizzle after the initial momentum.

Hakon Wium Lie, the CTO of Opera, is in Prague now meeting with Web enthusiasts and Czech Opera community members. He sat down with folks at root.cz and talked about the early days on the Web and his work with proposing CSS.

It’s an interesting interview with Hakon, which mostly covers his personal involvement in helping the Web move forward.

What I found most fascinating about this interview was his early vision of HTML and CSS.

After Netscape introduced the <font> tag and “color” attribute, Hakon fought hard against it.

“However, Bert Bos and I felt strongly that HTML should not degenerate into a visual language. We wanted HTML to remain a semantic language so the content could be presented on all sorts of devices, not just visual ones. Therefore we developed CSS. So, in a way, you could say that CSS was developed to save an even more important language, namely HTML.”

This vision is very much still alive today, especially with the upcoming HTML 5.

(Read the interview with Hakon)

(Hakon Wium Lie on his OLPC laptop)

The Opera Mini team is set to release its first major update to the popular Opera Mini 4 browser. The update, Opera Mini 4.1, is due out this week.

Opera Mini 4.1 adds the following new functionality:

• Ability to search for text within a webpage
• URL suggestions based on bookmarks and browsing history
• Ability to download files directly to the phone (only on phones with JSR-75 support)
• Ability to save webpages for offline use (only on phones with JSR-75 support)

A beta version of Opera Mini 4.1 has been out since early April.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a welcome message for our new Opera Watch bloggers over on the My Opera homepage (screenshot below).

(My Opera homepage)

The Opera browser was a Webware 100 winner in the category of ‘browsing.’

Here’s what Webware said about Opera:

“Opera is one of the oldest browsers around. It’s also made its way into all sorts of consumer electronics, including mobile phones, gaming portables, and even home video game consoles. Opera has combined many technological services into its desktop Web browser and is commonly regarded as the first to implement tabs for viewing multiple Web pages in the same window.”

It’s interesting to note that IE7, Firefox, Safari, and Maxthon also won in the ‘browsing’ category. It makes you wonder, though, how much the Webware 100 awards actually mean…