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Opera, Microsoft, and the Mobile Browser Market
DrEspenA writes "Salon has an interesting article on the competition for the mobile phone browser market. Ostensibly the article is about Microsoft's efforts to dominate the market, but the key protagonist is really Opera Software, which may be gaining the (initial) upper hand simply because they are not Microsoft. Good discussion of whether standards and familiarity really is necessary in the mobile browser market."
Because there's only so many browsers you can fit into a mobile...
Got Lynx?
What about Links?
well...if AvantGo (avantgo.com I believe) provided a service for cell phones then it would work quite nicely for a lot of news pages. It basically works the same way browsing for a Blackberry works.
You send a page that you want to a central server which parses and formats it. It then sends it back to your phone and boom...you get images, text, links and everything. I use it for my Handspring all the time and it downloads many of my favorite sites...of course I wish it could compact Slashdot further but I think Cmdr Taco may have to talk to the AvantGo people about it.
internet like monkeys'
Am I the only one that thought that this wasn't particulary unque? Hell, Lynx has been doing it with text for ages and AvantGo (with "display tables" turned off) does exactly the same thing.
Whilst the Opera guy may think that the browser war is hotting up (he's wrong, MS have won, everything else is relegated to the niche position and always will be - there are far too many Joe Blow users out there), they are definately onto a winner in the mobile arena.
Oh finally, for those that don't know, Sendo are not a well known manufacturer of mobile phones here in the UK. The reason being is that they don't sell under their own brand. Their business model is to create cheap network operator branded phones and for that, they do pretty well.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Well, if you read the article you will see that they indeed say there are more reasons to choose Opera besides the "they're not MS"-argument. For example the fact that Symbian's OS for mobiles together with Opera is much more 'tweakable' and allows for more personalized software on the phones.
I guess they will (mainly) use the "Microsoft is an evil monopoly"-argument to convince the businness-guys and the other arguments for the tech guys.
"Son, in a sporting event, it's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get" - Homer J. Simpson
``Good discussion of whether standards and familiarity really is necessary in the mobile browser market.''
What standards? Do you mean the de-facto standard for desktop computers (MicroSoft), or the vendor-independent web standards, which Opera has traditionally supported like no other?
---
``The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from; furthermore, if you do not like any of them, you can just wait for next year's model.''
-- Andrew S. Tannenbaum
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
on that market, and that leader is Openwave.
Their solution is already selling millions a month.
The real question is will people use smart phones to browse the web.
none Yet.
It won't be more than a year or two before those tiny devices can run at 480 by 640
:-O) I can't remember the name, but it was once covered here on /. I believe it may have been a Korean company. (that really narrows it down, I know...)
About two years ago, my wife brought home the prototype of a PDA/cell phone thingy. (the day before Andy Grove had showed the exact device at a wireless conference; I still wonder how she got a hold of it
Anyways, this thing had a 640x480 display and the device itself wasn't really bigger than say an iPaq. The most amazing thing was that it _actually_ worked. The built in phone worked fine and browsing was actually quite acceptable. The only thing that didn't work was the bluetooth pen that was supposed to double as the earpiece.
Well, I was very impressed to see the device that I had always wanted and had dreamed of. So I played with it for at least 5 minutes, thought 'ok, it can be done', and went back to doing fun stuff.
That quote is actually from the article (last page) where it talks about the fact that most mobile manufacturers are impressed with Opera just because they're surviving against MS, and as another poster has pointed out, because of MS' licensing deals being ridiculously restrictive...
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will! - Antonio Gramsci.
Get the Opera 7 Beta 1 from www.opera.com. It supports "small screen rendering", so you can test the experience (and your own site, web designers take note!). Somewhat quirky with frames right now, but a step in the right direction.
Too late. It's on the market since about a week in selected European countries.
The phone is manufactured for Microsoft and sold exclusively through a deal with Orange.
If it is a success, now that's a whole different question. I guess people prefer not having to reboot their phones.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
There is a really good Java HTML component called WebWindow (http://home.earthlink.net/~hheister/). The designer focused on memory consuption, which makes it a great option for mobile devices. And since Microsoft seems to be losing ground at least on the mobile phone market, this could become another competitor.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
Yes, I do work in embedded systems. Microsoft has already lost that market. On PDAs, they are still holding out pretty well, but in the long term I see them losing that, too.
Try http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2Fsearch-bool.ht ml&r=0&f=S&l=50&TERM1=Microsoft&FIELD1=ASNM&co1=AN D&TERM2=browser&FIELD2=&d=pall
So what they don't get by technology, they might try to force by litigation, particularly if software patents would be officialised in Europe.
When you are talking about standards in the context of browsers, u're usually talking about whether or not they comply with them and thus whether or not they encourage web developers to take advantage of "features" which are nonstandard. MS makes deliberately non-standards compliant browsers in order to seduce web developers and unknowing (Office and Frontpage) users into increasing the number of sites which dont work right in Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, etc. This is a disgusting manipulation and attempt to take over for one's own purposes something which was intended to be universal and available to all.
Therefore, implicitly equating "standards" with MS's "familiarity" while talking about browsers is dumb. If MS doesn't take over by convincing the phone companies that their phones need to be maximally familiar to windows users, then there is some hope that standards compliant browsers such as Opera will prosper in this sector.
IMO, there are a few good uses of the Internet on the run. I commute, as do many people, by train to work. During the 15 minute ride I have a few options:
I can look out of the window at houses and offices
I can try and make eye contact with the various passengers near to me
or I can visit various news sites using my mobile device and pass the time by reading interesting stories.
There can be a use for mobile browsing, but I believe that the devices will need to get better, and connectivity options (GPRS/WiFi) will also need to get cheaper.
Tim
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
The Openwave (www.openwave.com) browser is already leading. It targets the small screen and limited input you will always have on a phone. Even if phone displays get better, phones will always have constraints that desktop browsers will never have. Openwave recognizes this.
Actually I would suggest a different approach: make websites decent.
Actually, I lived in Japan for a while, where cell phones users have been browsing for about 4-5 years now and *most* sites have a special "sub-site" for cell phone users. So instead of going to www.yahoo.com, you'd go to www.yahoo.com/imode and get less (if none) graphics.
Basically, you don't want (and shouldn't expect) to use a full graphic, java+flash based website...! Here is a good iMode example
-- Leeeter than leet
As someone who's done a fair bit of browsing on a system with 32MB of ram, (this doesn't leave much once windows takes a bite), I can assume that the reason Opera is using that much ram is because you have tons of ram free.
Kinda makes sense, if you have ram, you might as well use it as a cache of pre-rendered pages (or whatever else they use ram for.) Notice how easy it is to press the back button 30 times in IE, then do it in Opera.