- ØØ -

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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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.

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

Thumbs Up!

*cries in the corner*

great article btw :yes: