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Opera Software Brings Its Browser to Mobile Phones
13Echo writes "Now this is cool! Opera Software has presented a technology today that solves the problems of web pages on small screens. They have created a small-screen HTML rendering technique that slightly reformats web pages to fit within the bounds of small displays. Some screenshots can be found here along with extra details as to how they do it. A full press release can be found here. As a result, horizontal scrollbars are not needed, and it even features zooming abilities for magnifying web pages."
without the full press release is available at the register here
I hate to say it, but Microsoft beat Opera to the punch with their Pocket PC phones. They have been shipping with Pocket Internet Explorer for a few months now.
Isn't changing the appearance of a copywrited material illegal? I know people talk about this when removing banner ads from pages, noting that removing the code for the banner isn't really right, but you can take out the actual image.. Here it's still modification to the user, so how's it any different?
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
This should prove interesting. I really hope this surges opera forward in the mobile web browsing sector. Does anyone have an idea if IE for Windows pocket pc is to be implemented in current mobile phones?
If you need to get on the 'net that badly, you need a life.
IMHO, It's much more useful to use your mobile phone as an interface between your computer and the 'net. I do, and it works beautifully without any problems due to limited space. If it's a pain in the ass to set up your laptop to do this, then you really don't need to get on the 'net. Can't you wait the 15 minutes until you get home?
Porn doesn't look good on a 1X2" screen.
Come on, lynx has been doing this for years!
Does it cost more than your ipaq?
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
the idea is not to port Opera to the phones, its to port Linux. When we port Linux then we can run apps like XFree86 and tuxracer. Then I can have an 802.11b open source IP based phone and stop paying money to sprint!!!
ok, nice!
The next thing we need is phones with slightly bigger screens.
Small is beautiful, but I like it practical as well.
Look at the first mobile phones (GSM style). They were thicker. That is not good. But they were broader than the current models without that ever being a problem.
Why not go back to the slightly larger models and put a bigger screen in them?
120 chars is not enough!
mmmmmm forced useability.
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thank god allmighty for tities and beer
Opera was last of the 3 to come to the browser market, it's just amazing they're ahead of mozilla here. Besides, Internet Explorer is totally the wrong browser for a mobile phone, it's just too buggy, and to targeted toward dumb multimedia stuff instead of good page rendering. Besides, mobile phones and embeded stuff is usually more standard compliant, and IE has never been close.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I went on a kick for a while where I wanted to find one of these silly mobile devices that does everything. I bought an iPaq to replace an old broken Handspring, but instead of using it for contact information and such, I was watching Bruce Lee movies on it at work. What I finally realised is that even with limitless power, there is no way something with a screen that small and limited controls will ever be as useful as a real computer. Phones should make phone calls. The only real innovation I've seen lately is iSync from Apple, where you can syncronize addresses between your Palm, phone, and computer via bluetooth (not that I can afford a bluetooth phone). The rest of this is just silly.
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jonathan barket
True, nobody *needs* this, but it does do what is does well.
The only website I'd like to view on my phone is the yellow pages.
I am a Karma Library.
Instead of presenting table content in columns and rows, tables are reformatted into a one-dimensional structure that better fits smaller screens. Opera can selectively scale down large images or remove those that are superfluous, as well as some other tricks that make the pages fit small screens. And as a result, the user has no need for a horizontal scrollbar.
.. Opera's nice new redesigned website, using XHTML and CSS. No more tables.
:)
Now, let's see Mozilla.org do the same please
Run Lynx or Links. Seriously.
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jonathan barket
I guess this means I can /. on my mobile phone and be able to read without scrolling, eh? ^^;
These phones better have a good way to scroll through pages.
I'd fix their website, and I'm sure a bunch of other people would just being kind... but nobody trusts anyone in the internet world. It's not like their site is that complex either, truely sad.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
If my iPaq can't run a quake server on emulated PalmOS while converting my mp3s to ogg while I watch a 160x120 AVI of the matrix on my 20-minute commuter rail trip, then the terrorists have already won.
High WAP charges, already slow download speeds (9.6k IIRC), and the Nokia featured in the story is by far the largest display on a mobile currently available here (most others are considerably smaller though PDAs will benefit), mean this wont be useful for me in the near future.
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that bong ba ba ba bong
Its great to see that this is going, but how long do we think it will take Sharp to release a new ROM for the Zaurus?
In Opera 6, you can zoom pages from 20 to 1000%, switch to a custom stylesheet with one click, use mouse gestures, browse in tabs (long before Mozilla did it), highlight a piece of text and do a dozen different kinds of search on it with a single right-click...
What did IE 6 add? Cookie management. And, uh ...
Opera runs on a dozen OSs, IE has to target Windows environments only.
Are Microsoft complacent, or is IE 7 going to incorporate some of these useful new features and maybe even innovate a little?
My collegues and I refuse to carry mobile phones despite the number of emergency-type situations we often find ourselves in. Based on a few simple Blender-3D models I threw together during my a couple of lunch breaks, the analysis of how electromagnetic radiation absorbed by the body affects the shape and orientation of our cells is nothing short of frightening.
So, this news that Opera can allow for Web browsing via mobile phones in a more functional and advanced manner isn't very important to folks like me who wish to avoid getting cancer (radiation from 900 to 2450 MHz -- the range we are exposed to by mobile phones, microwave ovens, and police and air-traffic radar -- has been proven to be deadly in lab studies with smaller mammals as the patients).
So, just some advice from one physicist to his fellow geeks -- think before you buy that snazzy new phone (with Opera software, perhaps) because you'd almost be better off taking up a less-dangerous habit such as smoking fags (known as "cigarettes" in the states, I believe).
Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S., Canada, B3H 3J5
Reqwireless WebViewer already solved these same problems almost a year ago, and with the added bonus that it works on many more mobile phones than what Opera appears to be targeting.
Opera still seems limited to Symbian OS phones like the Sony Ericsson P800 and Nokia 7650, which Reqwireless WebViewer supports. Additionally, Reqwireless WebViewer works on phones such as the Motorola i85s, i95cl, Accompli 008, T720, V60i, Samsung SPH-A500, and RIM BlackBerry 5810.
(Disclaimer: I work for Reqwireless and wrote most of WebViewer. I'm kind of annoyed that Opera is acting as though they've done something new.)
Is it just me or does the image look to be a PR Photoshop hack?
If enough people start surfing the net from small devices, web logs will show that and the web designers will have to listen.
Other than that, this is the way to go. We don't need yet one more document format for small devices. Better use HTML/XHTML and adapt the rendering to the device you are using ...
Such as:
"Visually impaired users can zoom out on a page to achieve legible font sizes for reading."
Zoom out to get legible fonts? Yeah.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
I'd say that the first impression is that this looks very promissing. This combined with zooming will work with most textbased sites, but there might be problems with sites using tables to structurize a graphical menu (games sites, etc. not just p0rn :) ). /. on the train going to work instead of sitting here wasting my boss' time.
Anyway, it will allow me to read
While the Opera browser is cool, the SmartTrust internet browser is even smaller - it fits on any standard SIM-card.
From the sounds of it, it's encouraging the use of tables. What does it to to sites which follow the standards and use div's? I wonder if it handles wired.com properly.
Nice enough, i think M$ already did something like this though. But still nice work by Opera, the big question is now: Will they land a deal with one of the larger mobile phone creators? If they do, hurraz, Yet another not-IE(hence, standards following) platform will be introduced. Each of these(Sony choosing Netscape for its PS2 is a other example, and there's more) will be yet another reason for the web developers to follow the standards, which of course is good news for users of non-exploder browsers.
All we need now is that Mozilla/Gecko quickly implements this. Because there's no doubt in my mind, that we will see a lot of embedded browsers being based on Mozilla/gecko in the future.
In about 5 years time we'll see embedded browsers in a lot of different devices, like mobile phones (and properly stationary phones too), consoles, DVD players etc. etc. Not all these devices, not matter how much M$ want it, will use Windows/IE.
And no, I do not carry a laptop with me all the time. Did you just say someone else what in the need of a life?
I do carry a cell-phone though, and WAP might have been the solution, had it worked. My phone has WAP support, but I have yet to make it do anything remotely useful.
AvantGo has been doing this for at least the past three years. Hopefully this will create some healthy competition in the handheld market.
Ya Sure! You Betcha!, The_THOMAS
What I wanna know is, can I hold down the right softkey and move the phone to the left to go back?
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
While the Opera browser is cool, the SmartTrust internet browser is even smaller - it fits on any standard SIM-card.
Now I put linux on the little critter, which I don't use much anyway. Just an(other) expensive toy...
This Danger phone browser that I am using right now does remarkably well on sites with tables, spacer gifs, and other awful hacks. On some more modern, standard compliant pages it is quite broken. Go figure. Since it is proxy based, it saves a lot of bandwidth, and upgrades aer automatic. There is certianly no horizontal scrolling however. No spelling checker or cut and past yet either. (I can't overstate the usefull ness of the dangerphone/hiptop/sidekick though, mapquest becomes a killer app when you can use it on a device that's more portable than my wallet) I'm really glad to see more browsers for non pc form factors though. Maybe this will be another nudge to get designers to stop designing for IE only.
As a designer I don't like this concept at all. I placed my content in two columns for a reason and when the web browser makes decisions to combine this data, they can ultimately change, and confuse, the meaning of the data. We don't need cell phones with full web page support, we need to start pushing the use of XML to push data to these devices in ways that are more practical. I hope there is a way to force Opera to render the page the way I designed it the way IE offers a meta tag that shut off the smart tags feature of their web browser.
I have to admit that I don't read The Reg nearly as often as I'd like mainly because of their awfully clumsy layout. keeping it is apparently important to them.
To give us a true feel how the new browser functions, they could of at least shown how how a real news site looks like (slashdot.org) and a nuddie site (goats.cx). Then people can make their decisions based upon that. Remember.. its all about the nuddies baby.
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
If you've got a Nokia 7650, you don't need to wait for Opera's next-year release. You can enjoy the real Web today, with no horizontal scrolling (unless you want it when viewing full-size images), using Reqwireless WebViewer. Also works with most other J2ME phones.
Uh, hello Slashdot?!
Espial Escape has had these features for years!
Escape is a state of the art, pure-Java browser that dynamically fits HTML4 content onto mobile phones & TV screens. Check it out!
Don't I already have this on the Zaurus? Is this just a marketing 'trick' since they've ported it to mobile phones, or have they actually developed something newer/cooler than the current Opera scaling (which is pretty sweet IMHO)?
m00.
The article mentions the ability to zoom, but doesn't mention anything more. What I would like is the ability to look at the web page rendered in 640x480 dimensions, and be able to zoom in as necessary. The example pages are stripped down content, and that is a very cool feature without a doubt. But, sometimes I think it would be nice to be able to see what the page looks like in more native resolutions. Just think, zooming in from 10% of the normal size, to 500% to read the article...
I had an old 486 DX/2 50 laptop I used for ages with Opera. It was great on the old machine, no slow down at all. But, it was 640x480. I would frequently have to look at pages 50% of their normal size to see everything at once (like big headers). Once I found what I was looking for, I would zoom in like 200% so I could read the article text. I imagine this feature would be even more useful on a cell phone, especially one running at at HALF the resolution I had on that laptop.
The examples the article gives makes it seem like Opera is a super efficient automatic AvantGo. I want to be able to look at the real think on my PDA or phone using PDA technology.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
I compared the screenshots with the original sites, and in my opinion the Opera rendering is better than the original, on ANY display, including my huge office desktop monitor. I want that kind of layout in my desktop browser!
TA
Does this mean that, in addition to the morons that drive around with their phone glued to their ear, we will also have to cope with more braindead nitwits that browse the net on the go?
Less sarcastically, I'd rather have a phone that is good and inexpensive at basic oral communication than one that has tons of features that I will never, or very seldom, use.
And I suppose Opera is then going to be sticking those exceptionally annoying flashing ads on my Nokia?
There's a great option to Opera Small-Screen rendering - Plucker. While not yet ported to cell phones (and designed for offline browsing), the screen width is similar to a palm pilot, which Plucker is designed for, and the backend could be compiled to run on a phone. Plus the source is open and the license is GPL2! All it would take is some porting of the renderer, and you'd have an open-sourced small screen browser.
Visit the Plucker web site.
Tony
Boohoo, your pixel-perfect layout is ruined. SFW? Use a PDF if you want you precious layot to survive. This "I designed this web to be 643pixels wide and use all kinds of shitty 1pixels imagaes to layout it exactly this way in IE, so screw other browsers". Please grow up. As a designer your job is to make the web look good in any browser. Not pixel by pixel.
This attitude is starting to piss me off!
J.
And what aspects of cellular calling are current cellphones not "masters" of?
How are they not "masters" of paging?
What requirements are they missing in the above?
You're being bitter just for the sake of being bitter.
I'm tired of the "jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none" hardware that's coming out these days. I personally find no need to have a web browser built into my phone (or for that matter, I have no use for a phone that CAN have a web browser built in).
I noticed the screenshots provided seem to have fewer ads then when I visit those pages on my desktop, such as The Register which is supposed to have four banner ads on above and to the right of an article. I wonder if future versions of Opera for the desktop will offer such technology even through it's not needed.
It would probably be a bad thing though. Opera aleady has enough problems displaying pages properly (I still love it, though), I don't think they'll want to have a bunch of pissed off webmasters intentionally using non-compatible design.
The poster's comment wasn't sarcastic. Though I agree, it is hard to pick up on it when it doesn't exist.
you aren't very good at picking up sarcasm are you?
Opera in phone: Good.
Phone going off at the Opera: Bad.
Thanks for your attention.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
They have to do something about the feeling of falling down the side of a sky scraper while scrolling. It's a loooong way down! I got tired of doing it half way down the page, but hopefully the experience would be better using a real phone.
Bitstream do something similar for PDA's with a product called ThunderHawk. Instead of reformating the page as such what they do is use a custom font that is much more readable on a pda sized device and resize the images on the fly.
Most PDA's at the moment use a 320x240 screen resolution, using ThunderHawk gives you a 640x480 view of a webpage but still using the 320x240 pda screen. Works really well.
I'm not too impressed with the screenshots they've provided. Each of the four pages they show has a quite basic tabular layout anyway so it's fairly trivial to change the table dimensions from 4x6 to 1x24, for instance. I'd much rather have seen how it handles some more challenging sites.
Input error. Replace user and press any key to continue.
It's considered very rude to bring your mobile phone to the Opera.
This thing is still a huge hack. Only a few HTML sites can be displayed on phones.
People don't realize why WAP was developed in the first place and why WAP is here to stay... WAP is a wireless protocol providing reliable transport over a wireless medium. Something TCP/IP can't do over the airwaves, sorry. Wap 2.0 supports WML which is optimized for small screens. It does exactly what this does.. but better. C'mon, rolling tables into 1 dimension is a hack. WML accomplishes this much better with decks. If you're familiar with WML you'd know this.
In the future WAP 2.0 will support XHTML.. and HTML is merging into XHTML. Then, and only then, can we have one markup on websites and display it properly for all situations on both wireless devices and wireline devices.
So, don't be surprised if carriers are using WAP for a long, long time despite all the FUD and bullshit.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
I guess the fact that you don't scroll horizontally on WebTV (1996) eluded the marketing folks at Opera. This reformat-the-page stuff has been happening for years.
The Danger HipTop also has the same feature, and it's even in a cell phone. Oddly enough, two out of three founders were early WebTV employees.
We like to laugh about patenting fire and the wheel, but let's face it: those wacky marketing types can reinvent stuff ten times faster than the USPTO could ever hope to.
Imagine what ICQ.com will look like on a screen that reformats everything so it only scrolls vertically. Page 1/1824, woo.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Kudos to the best browser development team out there. Way to do it again guys and make sure to keep up the good work!
Ever notice how fast Windows runs? Neither did I.
In other words, if they want ads, and they want such an enforcement, then the ads should be in ASCII text somewhere it is visible.
Just what we need.. another reason for people to brag about how great gesture notation and tabbed browsing are.
I can see it now.. people spasmatically jerking their cell phones around trying to get gesture notation to work.
Okay, TOFU-posting is somewhat understandable when usin internet explorer, since it automatically places the quoted text below you cursor, with room to write to and an "original message follows" -heading.
But why go to the trouble of quoting a message on Slashdot just so you can post your own message on top of it? Especially since Slashdot posts have a link to the parent message.
I use Blazer on my Samsung SPH-I300 phone with PalmOS. It does the same trick with tables.
Opera's already been doing this for quite a while. Take a look at their release for Qtopia, which runs on the Zaurus and other Linux-based PDAs. It's a very nice feature and works very well on the Zaurus's small screen.
Now I can use a wireless phone to pull numbers from the cell phone book directory and call people.
Oh wait, there is no cell phone directory.
Betcha it's handy for pr0n and mp3s though.
Punters
Time to get an Opera icon for /. it is, mmm.:)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
The IE for Macintosh is actually supperior due to its better handling of standards tests pages. IE for Solaris is officially deprecated, and has become abandonware.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I hope it also recognizes the CSS media="handheld" attribute.
What's easier, reading the original post and someone's response to it on one page, OR as you seem to prefer, reading someone's response, and having to click back to see what in the hell he's responding to?
And the trophy goes to common sense.
Okay, TOFU-posting is somewhat understandable when usin internet explorer, since it automatically places the quoted text below you cursor, with room to write to and an "original message follows" -heading.
But why go to the trouble of quoting a message on Slashdot just so you can post your own message on top of it? Especially since Slashdot posts have a link to the parent messageI
I need this for my PC so I can DOCK my browser to the left or right of my screen AND auto-hide the thing when I'm doing other stuff.
A small-screen browser on a big screen means I can devote more of my desktop to real work AND still see pictures and stuff. Thats an idea whos time has come.
this am best reading on bizarro world!
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
It's a beta hack.
Bitstream's Thunderhawk is a Mozilla-based browser which one-ups Opera by using a server-based compression algorithm to speed the downloading of pages by a factor of 3, usually more. Not only is the display slick and very fast, but combined with the compression, you're saving money by using less bandwidth at the same time you download the page in less time.
/. when Thunderhawk was publicly released, but didn't make the frontpage. (It's a great program that I thought deserved some press.) How come Opera has enough celebrity power to make it to the top, but Thunderhawk and other similar products don't?
It's been available publicly for 6 months, and was fairly widespread in beta for the same period of time before its official release.
Granted, it only runs on Pocket PC right now, but that's because the proprietary font which makes the small text so readable requires a sufficiently sharp display. They're beta testing a version to run on the Clie now, and other clients are coming as well.
I posted to
If you post, they will mod it.
I've been using Opera on my Diamond Mako (Psion Revo+) for well over a year now. Is the version for the phones that run a Symbian OS that much different?
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
That would mean that using a textbroswer would be illegal too, wouldnt it?
Great, I could use a browser with flash, javascript and proper html rendering capabilities on my handheld!
Or is it "Slashdot won't work with Opera?"
/. to ask them; so I end up using Opera for most things but sometimes have to switch to IE when using Slashdot! /. gets commission from MS for this...
Half the time, when I click on a link on the main page to get to a story, Opera/Slashdot forgets who I am and I become Anonymous Coward. Especially irritating when I want to reply or moderate! Logging in again doesn't help: the login is accepted but ignored.
I asked Opera but they don't know what is going on, and there doesn't seem to be any way of contacting
I hope
Opera 6 supports both old style MDI and new-style tabbed mode where you can have multiple windows. Opera refers to Tabs as "Pages" so you have a "Page bar".
I've even created a screenshot for you as this is an oft-repeated piece of misinformation.
I find the tabs in Opera 6 much more usable than their Mozilla counterparts. Improvements include:
- Ability to drag tabs between windows.
- Ability to drag a tab off a window to create a new window with just that tab.
- Drag and drop reordering of tabs.
- Ability to double click on any empty space on a tab bar to create a new tab, rather than having to hit a small new tab target.
Opera's paged mode is simply more polished. If you try to do something it just works as you'd expect (I discovered most of the above just by trying them and being pleasantly surprised that the software did what I was expecting).Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
And why do I need a dial? I can turn the crank and get Millie who will connect me to anyone I need. Even long distance, now!
New capabilities allow people to change how they use the tools available. It's a slow evolution. Sometimes, there are branches that die out or should die out (WinCE, for example).
DSL and wireless means I can browse decently from my coffee table. "Hey, what's that actor from" means that with tv.yahoo.com and imdb, I can find out, now. Not feasable with desktop in another room and 9600 with PEP connections.
But if I can get IP via otherwise "dead time" on the cells, and I can get things like, hmmm, directions, or "find me the nearest public restroom", then it changes how I interact with the world.
Now, if the stupid 1930's phone interface would die - the 4x4 dial grid (exposing just 3x4) is too stupid for words to spell on. The Kycotera palm/cell showed promise, but it not nearly rugged enough for real people use.
I <heart> my Zaurus.
Using it now ;-) (On my win98 laptop)
The linux version also works fine.
Although what I (generally) do is make my link to slashdot http://slashdot.org/index.pl instead of http://slashdot.org/ to ensure that I get the dynamic page.
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
How come Opera has enough celebrity power to make it to the top, but Thunderhawk and other similar products don't?
er...because Thunderhawk doesn't bring anything new to the table. From the screenshot on the page you linked, you still require scrollbars where the width of the page exceeds your screen size, you still get the banner ads etc.
This version of Opera reformats the page - specifically for small devices - that's what's new and different here.
Also, AFAIK, server based page compression has been available for years now - it's just that for some reason it's very rarely used.
Every Solidarity center had piles and piles of paper ... everyone was
eating paper and a policeman was at the door. Now all you have to do is
bend a disk.
-- A member of the outlawed Polish trade union, Solidarity,
commenting on the benefits of using computers in support
of their movement.
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