Opera Offers PC-Like Browsing on Mobile Devices
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On Tuesday, Opera Software unleashed the latest commercial version of its mobile Web browser. Opera Mobile 9.5 was developed for sophisticated mobile devices and offers users a desktop-like browsing experience, complete with zooming and panning. The Norwegian company said the browser loads pages quicker for a more PC-like experience.
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A growing set of developers is setting to work making Web browsing on a phone match the experience on a PC.Skyfire, a startup in Mountain View, California, joined the fray on Monday when it unveiled a free browser intended to support everything a PC browser can. That includes Flash video, Quicktime, Javascript, AJAX, and more, though not everything may be there right now, according to Nitin Bhandari, Skyfire&#39;s CEO. The browser is now in a private beta test for U.S. users only. The software was demonstrated at the Demo conference in Palm Desert, California.Apple&#39;s iPhone changed the mobile browsing world last year when it drew a huge following with its Safari browser. Unlike most browsers for phones, it lets users view a full, standard Web page all at once and zoom in to make up for the small size of the screen, though it doesn&#39;t support Flash video and some other standard Web features.Meanwhile, more opportunities have opened up for third parties to get any sort of application onto a consumer&#39;s mobile phone. Parts of&#160;Google&#39;s Android development environment&#160;are already available to developers, and Apple is preparing a software development kit for the iPhone. Both Verizon and Sprint Nextel, two of the biggest U.S. operators, have outlined plans to allow any device and any application on mobile networks.&quot;The iPhone has pretty much settled the debate. People want a rich, full Web experience,&quot; Skyfire&#39;s Bhandari said. &quot;There&#39;s a lot of consciousness that that&#39;s the bottom now, and everything now has to be there or above it.&quot;Since the phone&#39;s June debut, Mozilla has started developing a mobile version of Firefox, which looks somewhat like mobile Safari in screenshots on Mozilla&#39;s wiki. However, Mozilla has been vague about when that software will come out. Norwegian browser vendor Opera has its own mobile browser, Opera Mini.Skyfire&#39;s product will be set apart from Opera Mini and others by supporting the full browsing experience, Bhandari said. It does so by relieving the phone from some of the heavy lifting of presenting a Web page. In fact, a server transcodes every page into an efficient protocol that Skyfire has developed over the past 18 months, he said. The additional exchange of packets between phone and server to make that possible isn&#39;t a problem, because the server can carry out tasks much faster than a phone, according to Bhandari.&quot;The delay added by the server is actually such a small percentage of the time we&#39;re actually saving ... that it&#39;s actually a huge benefit in the end-user experience,&quot; Bhandari said. Skyfire operates the servers in its own datacenter.Skyfire can deliver full versions of popular Web sites, such as YouTube and ESPN, as demonstrated in a YouTube video. The zooming function, the critical tool for viewing full-size Web pages on a small screen, is different from the iPhone&#39;s &quot;pinch&quot; and &quot;unpinch&quot; gestures. A gray box appears over part of the Web page, and users can size that box to cover the area of the page they want to see full-screen, then tap on it to zoom in, Bhandari said. The browser also features a search bar and a tab with featured links in categories including news, sports and video.The browser is available only for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 today, but a version for Symbian, as well as an international beta test, are coming later, Bhandari said. Skyfire might also develop versions for Android and for the iPhone once Apple&#39;s SDK becomes available, he said. It is talking with handset makers and mobile operators about having the browser built into phones, but also sees search and advertising as possible revenue sources.In addition to invited testers, a limited number of public users will be allowed to participate in the beta. They can sign up at Skyfire&#39;s Web site.
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InfoWorld - Opera Software&#39;s plans to beef up its browser so that Adobe Flash Player-like functionality will be intrinsic to the program are a move in the right direction.
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Many popular shopping sites offer mobile versions of their search tools, which can be especially useful for those always on the go.
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Opera Software and SlipStream Data announced the integration of the Opera browser with SlipStream&#39;s web and email acceleration technology.
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Opera Software on Tuesday released the final version 3.0 of its Opera Mini Web browser, which is designed for mobile phones. The upgrade introduces a number of new social networking features, such as photo sharing and a built-in RSS reader.
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An experimental interface lets users of handheld devices rearrange Web pages with a single pen stroke, collapsing unwanted elements and zooming relevant content.
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InfoWorld - Some of the first Windows Mobile 6.0 phones to hit the market will include Opera Software ASA&#39;s mobile browser, in addition to Microsoft Corp.&#39;s browser.
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(InfoWorld) - A little-known search engine has optimized its offering for mobile devices, joining an increasingly crowded market of services targeting cell phone users. Clusty's mobile service returns search results for mobile users much like it does on computers, but once users click on a search result, they can see the difference. Clusty optimizes Web sites for mobile phones, displaying pages to fit in the small screen of the phone and stripping out images that wouldn't look good on a mobile, said Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO of Vivisimo, the company that runs Clusty. The Web sites are filtered through Clusty servers, where software does the optimization before displaying them on the phone, he said. The process is reminiscent of one that Opera Software ASA uses with its Opera Mini browser. The Opera Mini browser works in conjunction with Opera's backend servers that strip down sites for better viewing on mobile devices. Like Clusty's PC search, its mobile search displays categories of search returns in addition to regular results. A search for Seattle, for example, returns such categoriesÂ as arts, real estate, University of Washington, and Puget Sound. Each category contains different relevant sites. The mobile Clusty has an additional feature as well. At the bottom of the page, users will see refined queries, which are related queries that users can choose to click on rather than having to type in another search. In the Seattle example, the refined search terms included City of Seattle, Seattle Mariners, and Seattle University. Clicking on one of those terms will return results as if the term were typed in the search box. Clusty joins a variety of companies in the mobile search market. The big names in computer-based search, such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Ask.com, all offer mobile search services. In addition, companies like Medio Systems, InfoSpace, and JumpTap develop technologies that can be used by other companies, such as mobile operators, to offer self-branded mobile search. Clusty search works by combining search results of other services and also crawling parts of the Web itself. Clusty's creator, Vivisimo, also provides search services for government agencies, including the U.S. National Library of Medicine, as well as enterprises. It recently introduced technology that lets users of BlackBerrys and PDAs search corporate intranets.
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Opera Software has released a beta of its upcoming desktop browser, code-named Kestrel, which can synchronize bookmarks between a PC and a mobile device.The update to Opera 9.5, released Thursday, also fixes &quot;hundreds of bugs&quot; that were in the alpha version, said Huid Kleinhout, desktop team manager, in Opera&#39;s desktop blog. &quot;Web site rendering has been significantly improved, along with performance, stability and usability,&quot; he wrote.The synching feature, called Opera Link, can sychronize bookmarks between Opera&#39;s mobile and desktop browsers. When a person uses Opera Mini 4.5, a mobile browser that&#39;s also in beta, and the desktop browser, new bookmarks are copied to a server and made available in both browsers.The bookmarks can also be accessed from any other browser by logging into the Opera Link Web page.Opera Link is designed to help people who want to visit a Web site on their mobile device that they have bookmarked on their PC, but don&#39;t want to search for it again or type in the address. Or for people who are at work or a friend&#39;s house and want to find a Web page again that they bookmarked at home.The synchronization also works with Speed Dial, a feature that presents thumbnail graphics of a person&#39;s favorite Web sites in a new tab.Opera Link is available for Macintosh, Windows and Linux computers, and users will need to sign up for a free Opera account. Opera Link was also in the alpha release of Opera 9.5, but it was buggy.Opera, based in Oslo, is a distant third in browser market share behind Microsoft&#39;s Internet Explorer and Mozilla&#39;s Firefox.&#160;
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Mobile Internet Devices will surf, play music and video, take calls and pictures--and more.
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Opera Software has released a beta of version 4 of its popular Opera Mini browser for mobile phones, which integrates features the company designed for its Nintendo Wii browser. Now, users can see an entire Web page in "overview mode" and zoom in to specific parts.
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Group seeks to make Web access for mobile device users as easy as it is for desktop users.
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Following the lead of Mozilla's Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Opera Software has incorporated a new phishing filter into its Opera Web browser to block sites bent on stealing financial information or other sensitive data from unsuspecting users.
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(InfoWorld) - Opera Software's plans to beef up its browser so that Adobe Flash Player-like functionality will be intrinsic to the program are a move in the right direction. At present, Web developers have no consistent way to deliver media-rich content to the unlimited variety of platforms and browsers used by surfers worldwide. Using client- and server-side scripting, Web developers can divine which browser and operating system a user is running, but that's of little help. Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, and the rest all require plug-ins, also known as Browser Helper Objects, to present content that's richer than W3C standards demand. Media player plug-ins, with Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, and QuickTime leading the category, are not consistently implemented across platforms. Each has its own style for wiring into browsers, its own terribly annoying traits, and its own set of proprietary formats that the others can't play, and yet each wants to take control of in-browser media playback when it's installed. And while all of these players have the ability to mix text, video, audio, scripting, and GUI interaction, these features are hardly ever used. Media players are used to play video and audio, and user interaction and scripting are handled in the browser with decidedly mixed results. Only Adobe Flash Player touches all the bases: vector graphics, scalable text, animation, audio, video, and scripting, and it rolls all of these types into a single document that's played by one widely accepted plug-in. Flash Player is smooth and responsive enough to handle interactive games, and encoding video for Flash allows developers to embed a unique GUI into the video. Windows Media, RealPlayer, and QuickTime don't hit that "one for all" sweet spot. But Flash is still a plug-in, large and highly demanding of computer resources, and while its platform coverage is broader than others, it's far from ubiquitous. Flash Player's girth leaves it notably absent from mobile devices, and that's where a common solution for rich, interactive multimedia documents is most needed. Flash Player is well distributed, but the superlative Opera platform-native full browser solution is everywhere: Windows, Solaris, QNX, OS X, OS/2, Linux (SPARC, PowerPC, and x86), FreeBSD, and BeOS, as well as the three most popular feature/smartphone platforms, Symbian S60, Windows Mobile, and UIQ. Opera offers consumer electronics vendors a browser for embedded and set-top use as well. Opera is ubiquitous, but even it can't control what happens when a user clicks a link to a media file. Opera Software has decided to attack this issue head-on, promising to implement Flash-like rich, scripted multimedia document functionality directly in its browsers. That's a bold and potentially market-changing move. If Web developers can count on one browser consistently implementing rich multimedia playback, they might steer users toward that browser rather than pointing them to various required plug-ins. Of course, that's precisely what Opera Software is hoping for; Opera is commercial software, and hooking sites on its built-in Flash-like player would drive sales. But that's par for the course: Flash Player, like Apple, Microsoft, and Real plug-ins, is distributed free of charge to pull sites, users, and content creators into tools and premium services, and in Microsoft's case, to Windows. With Adobe open-sourcing its ActionScript JavaScript interpreter, and various open source projects aiming to clone or rival the functionality of Flash Player, Opera Software won't be the only game in town on desktops. But Opera has a shot at locking up the mobile market, freeing users from the proprietary, format-locked players that wireless operators burn into mobile phone firmware and hook to their browsers. One place where Adobe, Opera Software, and open source multimedia players can't go is the one place they're needed most: Apple's iPhone. Apple's decision to keep iPhone closed to third-party applications, despite its OS X underpinnings, means that iPhone is all about writing Web sites that target the Safari browser and play files encoded for QuickTime media formats. Apple's decision to lock developers inside Safari might be more tolerable if Apple were to broaden Safari along the lines that Opera Software intends for its browser. With Safari extending its reach to Windows, embedding Flash-like functionality in Safari would open the door to a great many possibilities for the sort of rich, interactive on-line (and off-line â Flash is competent for a limited range of desktop applications) content that would otherwise require the use of native code. In time, inclusive, cross-platform Flash or Flash-like rich multimedia document player technology will spread to cover all popular desktop, mobile, and consumer electronics platforms. It will happen because mobile and consumer electronics are green fields for a one-for-all rich multimedia document technology. It's a matter of who gets there first and who snags the greatest mind share. Vendors that decide to stay proprietary, who don't start developing or partnering toward the goal of a cross-platform Flash-style player, will find themselves behind the pack among users who want to take their video, audio, games, and lightweight applications on the road without being limited to a vendor or wireless operator's chosen player.
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Taking a page â albeit a tinier one â from the iPhoneâs design is a new test version of the Opera Mini browser for cellphones.
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Alternative browser features protection against online scams.