A fantastic article in the Wall Street Journal today about Opera Mini
15 CommentsPublished August 2nd, 2007 10:41 AM EDT By Daniel Goldman
The Wall Street Journal today published a very well written article about Opera Mini and the state of mobile browsing.
The article is available on their website. I highly suggest you head over and read it.
As a bonus, why don’t you mention this article on your blog? Help spread the word of Opera Mini – make sure everyone else gets the opportunity to browse the real and full web on their mobile phones.
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arghhhh she mispelled my name
*cries in the corner*
great article btw :yes:
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I’ve used the Opera Mini on my SE W810i and it works perfectly. All of the sites render nicely, u can even see the pictures that actually been resized to fit your screen nicely. A really good approcah for user’s who want to surf on their normal mobile phones (not including smartphone).
Thumbs Up!
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I don’t understand why Microsoft (see article) would invest time and funds into developing a mobile browser when (1) there are perfect alternatives that work on Windows Mobile, and (2) when so much more needs to be done with Internet Explorer.
It sounds like Opera Mini’s share is bound to grow; hopefully these new users will know (your job, Opera Software) about the desktop version of their favorite mobile browser, and choose (fingers crossed) to give it a try
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PS: Does anyone know if Opera Mini loads the entire web page at once, or incrementally, as more parts of it become visible by scrolling? Just curious
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Chuck, I believe it loads all the content at once. Since when you zoom in, it’s instantaneous.
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Thanks Daniel – it makes sense, considering the zoom feature.
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OM loads pretty much all at once, but still lets you view as it’s loading — perfect solution! Got to a large page, then hit #3 as it begins loading and you get taken to the very bottom immediately. If you zoom in and scroll up, you can see place holders being filled with images as they are being downloaded. Suitable for very quick browsing.
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@kftgr: Got it! Thanks for the detailed description
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Just read the WSJ article. The only I didn’t like was that it begins with a mention of $20/month, which may initially connote that Opera Mini is not free. It is not until 1/3 of the way down that Opera Mini is said to be free; other than that, great article!
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Just received NetApplications.com’s newsletter (sorry, no link available to an online version of the newsletter.) Yet another positive Opera article…
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Aliso Viejo, CA based Net Applications announces July 2007 world wide Browser Usage Market Share results. For the last couple of years, we’ve all talked about how Firefox is gaining market share on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Firefox has done an outstanding job of putting the heat on Microsoft to get IE back up to speed with the other major browsers available. We’ve had some occasional stories about Safari and Opera, but Firefox had the meteoric run to over 15% market share – piquing to 15.42% in April 2007. So Firefox has gotten all the press of late.
But, here comes Opera. They’ve always been the real innovator in the browser world. Many of the most useful features in browsers have been developed by the Opera Engineers. Sure, they were a bit late to decide to give the browser away (as reported here), otherwise they probably would have enjoyed the success and press that Firefox earned. So while you can question the timing of that decision, you can’t argue with their commitment to innovation or to serving the handheld and smartphone markets.
I use Opera Mobile for handhelds, and it’s become a necessity for me now. The mobile version of IE is way behind Opera Mobile in terms of both features and just being able to render many websites. With the Opera browser, I can access almost any website, which means I can sometimes travel with just my handheld and leave the laptop at home (very nice for quick trips).
Opera Mini brings as close to a true browsing experience as is available today to smartphones. When browsing with Opera Mini, Opera will render and store the entire web page on their servers, and present you with a compressed version of the whole page. You can zoom into any part of the page, and access the parts you like without actually having to download the full page. This greatly reduces the size of the data transfers, and also makes accessing even large and complex web pages quick. You even get a virtual mouse with Opera Mini that you can control with your phone.
So, how has this affected browser market share, and what are the trends for the future?
First of all, Firefox has stopped growing its market share the last 3 months, and even started to recede a bit to 14.37% market share for July 2007.
Opera, meanwhile, is starting to see some significant growth lately, going from 0.64% market share in August 2006 to 1.13% (when you include Opera Mini) currently. Looking forward: Opera Mini is the best browser available for phones, and there are far more phones in the world than computers. I fully expect Opera to be the big browser story this time next year.
Find out more about Opera for your computer, handheld or phone at http://www.opera.com.
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Chuck, thanks for shaing the article. It’s certainly great to see Opera get the coverage and respect it deserves.
Btw, I subscribe to the same newsleter, but haven’t gotten that one. The last email I got from NetApplications was on July 17th.
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No problem
I guess they send their newsletter in batches; I received mine at 1:55 PM (CST)
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The link isn’t working for me. Does anyone have a transcript or mirror?
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Nevermind. It works in IE and FF. I wonder why it breaks in my version of Opera. I’m greeted by a blank page, it hasn’t downloaded (it’s like it failed to figure out the IP of the machine or something). I can’t edit site preferences, unblock/block content, view source, or anything.
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That happend to me yesterday too IceArdor at home. At the moment I posted my latest post on MyOpera. I used a few hours to find out that it was a cache problem. I found the article I wrote in the cache, then restored and saved it, and cleared my history and cache, restartet opera, and then all was good again. It has never happend to me before. And I am using 9.22 on XP at home too.
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