Science and technology news blog

Opera’s vice-president Tatsuki Tomita has mentioned that the company is developing a Flash plug-in replacement for mobile browsers. The problem with Flash for mobiles is that it uses a lot of CPU and memory. Here is an excerpt from Ars Technica:

Opera Software vice president Tatsuki Tomita has confirmed that his company is developing a replacement for the Adobe Flash plug-in, for use with future versions of the Opera Mini mobile web browser.

Tomita explained that the reason for this move is that the traditional Flash plug-in uses a large amount of CPU and memory resources, limiting speed and battery life on mobile platforms. The problem is exacerbated when the Flash plug-in is not well optimized for the platform it is running on—Macintosh users can attest to this first-hand. “You cannot execute and provide a good user experience,” Tomita told InfoWorld, referring to running the Flash plug-in on mobile devices.

Opera Mobile, soon to be a ubiquitous feature on Samsung handsets, offers keypad shortcuts that users can customize, an autocomplete function for URLs, and the unique ability to open as many as four windows at once. But perhaps the best-known feature in Opera Mobile is Small Screen Rendering, in which a full-sized Web page is sliced up and pared down to fit in a phone’s tiny window.
 
Hot on the heels of a new partnership with Nintendo to offer the Opera Web browser for the Wii game console, Opera has announced plans to put its browser on Samsung phones.

For a browser that has a small footprint, Opera Mobile packs a lot of features, including two rendering modes (“Fit To Screen” and “Desktop Display”); small buttons and scrollbars that leave space for a Web site’s content; and a customizable homepage that has a built-in search bar plus a list of the user’s 10 favorite Web sites.

But that’s just the start. Opera Mobile offers keypad shortcuts that users can customize; an autocomplete function for URLs; smooth scrolling; and the unique ability to open as many as four windows at once, jumping between them in the same way that users of Opera’s desktop browser can switch between open tabs. Each window can have its own display settings, including custom zoom.

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Microsoft’s venerable web browser, Internet Explorer, has been derided in the web universe for so long that it makes sense for the competition to have snuck in and stolen away some of the software kingpin’s marketshare.

While Microsoft’s IE web browser still has the largest marketshare of any web browser in the world, it has lost quite a few points in recent years to Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, which many believe has much better security features, as well as an entire universe of developers that make “extensions” to the actual browser—letting the customer customize their web experience as only they can.

And how about Opera, the stalwart Finnish company that many think is the best web browser on the planet? Opera used to charge for its web browser but then joined the competition (IE and Firefox) in giving it away for free.

Would Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) have been better served by acquiring Opera a few years ago? By doing so, it would have effectively taken a competitor out of the market, and also offered its millions of Windows users a much better web experience than what they already endure using IE. Sure, anti-competitive folks might have had a problem with Microsoft buying a web browser maker with a tiny marketshare percentage, but if serving customers the best possible product was the goal, perhaps Microsoft should have bought Opera.

Opera announced today that they have released their Opera Mini 3.0 Internet browser for mobile phones. Opera Software says Opera Mini can be used to easily browse and upload pictures to all online community sites, such as MySpace, Blogger and Flickr and securely using popular webmail such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail as well as making all Web transactions safe, including banking or shopping on eBay or Amazon.

The Opera Mini 3.0 browser offers secure connections, this browser makes all Web transactions safe, including banking or shopping on eBay or Amazon. Opera Mini 3.0 is globally available and can be downloaded free of charge from the Opera Software web site. As it is a Java application, this browser can be used on almost any mobile phone. Only a data plan through a carrier/operator is needed to access the Internet.

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The web browser is a cornerstone of the modern desktop or laptop. It provides a point-and-click interface to the internet. However, Microsoft is no longer the only serious player in this market.

Web monitoring specialist NetApplications.com says the software colossus commands more than 80 per cent of the browser market with Internet Explorer, which has been baked into every version of Windows for the past decade. A mere two years ago, that figure was a seemingly unassailable 92 per cent.

However, a sleek browser named Firefox has been eroding Microsoft’s market share since its impressive debut in November 2004 and it now counts 12.5 per cent of web users as its devotees.

So it’s no surprise that Microsoft last month unleashed IE7, a fresh version of its venerable web browser, which largely echoes Firefox’s roll call of features to make web surfing faster, easier and safer. That same week Firefox shot back its own salvo with the release of the long-awaited Firefox 2.

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