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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.
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.
It's a drop down box on the right side of the address bar. Download Opera at Opera.com and check it out!
It's a neat feature.. useful when pages use an 8 point font and the text is hard to read or when you follow the "Awful Link of the Day" over at somethingawful and have to scale down the 48 point yellow font on an orange background..
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.)
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!
There's no doubt about it: Opera is doing something new here. This will give them the edge for a while. And it's not the first time Opera have shown innovation when it comes to browsing. Mouse gestures, anyone?
Clever signature text goes here.
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
That's additionally painful because the screen updates aren't nearly instantaneous and more importantly, you can't scroll to the end of the line with a single button press. Stupidly, the hardware cursor keys do the equivalent of arrow keys, rather than PageUp/PageDown & Home/End. So to read the last two words of each line of a web page, you've got to scroll 4 right (redrawing each time), then scroll 4 back to start the next sentence. (Then probably scroll 2 down to advance through the document). Ten fairly slow redraws where one should've sufficed.
Its so irritating that I'd often tend to just ignore/guess the last word of each line, rather than crawl over to read it. If the website is nice enough to offer a "printable" or "pda" mode, then that'll generally work, by enabling line breaks based on your viewing width. Slashdot has the "&lite=1" option, for instance- too bad it doesn't stick when you link from the main page to an article!!
Because of those problems, I've often preferred to run lynx when browsing with a Zaurus. It ignores most of the page elements that lead to unflexible formatting. (Oddly, "links", a more advanced text-based browser, supports things like tables and frames, and thus becomes unusable on small screens the same as a pixelized program would)
Opera on the Zaurus will also view PDF files, and the problem is even worse there. All the same obstacles are there, PLUS the document authors probably used a dual column layout, PLUS redrawing after a scroll takes 10 seconds instead of 0.5. PDF is evil! The press release didn't mention it, but I hope they can apply some auto-reformating to PDF files as well.
My other hope, as always, is that they won't try to patent this technique. The Opera developers aren't in the US, so maybe they're not so infected by IP-fever...
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.
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.
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