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."

Comments

Re:why no choice?

[Skiboo]

Because there's only so many browsers you can fit into a mobile...

Re:Open Source?

[Mr Teddy Bear]

Got Lynx?

What about Links?

Small screen rendering

[Mr_Silver]

In Opera, engineers have solved the scrolling problem with something they call "small-screen rendering," in which HTML code is "massaged," von Tetzchner says, "so that it can fit on the screen." The results are intriguing; by examining the structure of the page, the browser produces a small-screen version that includes all the important content but requires only vertical scrolling.

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.

Re:Small screen rendering

[trezor]

• 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.

This is different. While Lynx just plainly ignores html-table-tags and replaces them with linebreaks, this Opera thingy is actually doing reformatting of the page, after a full analysis of the layout.

Even though I don't know how well this works, it seems like a extremely clever algoritm, and shouldn't be underestimated as simple table-dropping, which is actually a lack of standard features.

From the opera-quote:

• "massaged," von Tetzchner says, "so that it can fit on the screen."

This implies more than mere table-dropping to me at least, and especially if you read the press release (no I will nothunt it down for you).

Re:Small screen rendering

[WhaDaYaKnow]

Hell, Lynx has been doing it with text for ages

You are joking, right?

Rendering HTML in text mode is one thing. Add CSS, Javascript, DOM etc and it's an whole nother story.

I'm not saying that all these technologies are so great, but a large amount of sites rely on it today. Being able to render a document that contains all that stuff properly is unique by itself. There are only a handful of browsers that can get close.

What Opera does is difficult because not only are they trying to support all these technologies, but they also have to deal with these other trivialities that Lynx can conveniently ignore, called graphics/images.

Re:Not just anti-Microsoft

[StefMeister]

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.

Standards, uh?

[RAMMS EIN]

``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

There's already a leader

[Tsk]

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.

Re:Bad Reasoning...

[WhaDaYaKnow]

It won't be more than a year or two before those tiny devices can run at 480 by 640

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 :-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...)

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.

Re:Not just anti-Microsoft

[Nomad37]

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...

Now! In selected European countries

[CaptainZapp]

Don't be suprised if you find a Microsoft branded mobile phone released sometime in the next couple of years.

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.

Java for Mobile Devices

[grungeman]

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.

Re:nice

[rseuhs]

Microsoft failed in the embedded market (except on PDAs where they are doing OK) because:

• WinCE is too expensive. In lower numbers (like several hundred per year), you pay about 100$ per unit (at least that's what I have been told). I have no idea how much you pay for mass-produced devices, probably a lot less. Still you want to standardize on an OS, so you will choose one that can be profitable on both mass-produced devices and niche devices. You won't choose WinCE. Also you usually have only a very vague idea how many units you will sell of a particular device. When your device becomes a smash-hit, you may be easily be paying the WinCE license fees, but if the numbers stay slow, WinCE can turn the numbers into the red, espcecially if you have to lower the price of the device.
• WinCE is only suitable for PDAs and not really that useful anywhere else. WinCE comes with an good graphics library, but most embedded devices don't need it. With non-graphic applications, WinCE just slows you down.
• Nobody trusts Microsoft that prices and contracts will stay stable.
• You don't get the source code. (Yes, the end-user doesn't care, but the embedded developer does.)
• WinCE doesn't offer anything valuable. Yes, I'll get flamed for saying that, but face it: The only thing Windows does better than other operating systems is running Win32 or WinCE-PDA applications. If you don't need that, why use Windows?
• Embedded developers are not used to be dependent on the OS. General purpose operating systems became popular only recently on embedded systems. Most embedded systems were developed with no or a specially designed OS inhouse. Moving from the inhouse-OS (with source-code available and no license fees) to WinCE could very well be considered a step backward. The same person might be happily paing for Windows on his PC but would not dream of switching to a non-free (as in having the source and as in beer) OS.

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.

Microsoft has more has 300+ browser patents

[Balaitous]

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.

Re:Not just anti-Microsoft

[Skiboo]

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.