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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
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.
Come on, lynx has been doing this for years!
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
"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).
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.
.. 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
These phones better have a good way to scroll through pages.
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
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?
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 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.
My collegues and I refuse to carry mobile phones despite the number of emergency-type situations we often find ourselves in.
If you just want it for emergencies, why not just carry it around powered off, only turning it on to makes calls? I can't imagine you'd be significantly endangered (assuming the dangers you speak of) by a minute or two of exposure on the rare occasions you need to use it (especially if it is a real emergency).
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.
Because of the way tables are written in HTML, the Lynx way comes just by ignoring the table-formatting tags. So it's not really revolutionary or innovative. I bet there are plenty of other tags which are silently ignored in Lynx (and similar browsers). Of course, leaving something out is not necessarily a bad thing.
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If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
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.
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!
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
I'm sorry, but Opera beat IE here. Not only was Pocket IE a crippled version of Desktop IE (is Pocket IE 6 still as crippled? Haven't checked lately), while Opera's handheld offerings have always had the same rendering capabilities as on desktop. This is why Opera seems to be the browser of choice nowadays: You get everything, not just a renderer which has been crippled because it is normally too bloated. Opera is small, you know.
And now comes small screen rendering, where Opera basically gives you the ability to view any web page on your mobile device by doing some clever reformatting.
How exactly did "Microsoft beat Opera to the punch"?
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
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.
There's more to it that ignoring tables and images (which is basically what Lynx does). Remember that there are also images, colors etc. that need to be dealt with. If you read the article (I know this is Slashdot, but come on!), you will notice that Opera even tries to be "smart" when choosing what to display. It can even be set to block ads (which take up too much space on screen).
Clever signature text goes here.
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.
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.
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.
Opera is just a browser. It will probably be available on a number of different handhelds. The price depends on the handheld you want to buy, not on Opera.
Clever signature text goes here.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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