Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
-----
jonathan barket
.. 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.
-----
jonathan barket
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?
While the Opera browser is cool, the SmartTrust internet browser is even smaller - it fits on any standard SIM-card.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 can't help but feel that if more energy had been devoted to making designers more aware of how WWW differs from designing for paper, the web would have looked a lot better than it does today. not to mention that it would probably have depended less on outdated, kludgy techniques for forcing a particular look given a very narrow list of target user agents.
whenever I read comments from people who abhor the idea of content being adaptable to a wider range of user agents, I can't help but feel that these people have missed the entire point and are very much part of the problem.
perhaps what one should ask is how these people can be educated? how do you explain the basic idea of creating content that can be accessed on a wide range of user agents in a manner where the content can benefit from the feature richness of some UAs while still being usable on UAs that are more constrained?
to me the biggest problems seem to be that a) people are too lazy to care, b) too incompetent to understand why this is a good idea and c) too occupied defending their suboptimal use of technology to sit down and have a good, hard think.
besides, the rocks and sticks approach to "web design" doesn't exactly do wonders for things like getting browser developers to maximize the subset of CSS that actually works across products. the list of CSS-features that are broken in various browsers, and thus shouldn't really be used, is too long.
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