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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."
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
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.
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
"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?"
Nokia is the king. Nokia chose Opera for mobile. MS Pocket IE is a joke now.
Symbian is the king of PDA, they chose Opera.
Opera is the current king of non PocketPC (WinCE) PDA/Phone environment. BTW, no reason that Opera won't be implemented on Windows CE too... Its a totally respected company too.
Geeks, you don't have to hate Opera just to be c00l (the poster I replied, its not directed to you).
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.
These phones better have a good way to scroll through pages.
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
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 ...
"Are Microsoft complacent, or is IE 7 going to incorporate some of these useful new features and maybe even innovate a little?"
Call me mad but I bet they will somehow trick people to get a passport user.
Just like in XP, not forced but tricked.
So, support Opera too. They didn't do anything bad, just they are a small company (still!) and they earn their food money from coding. So, its not GPL. Easy as is.
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 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
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.
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.