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

why no choice?

[bluelip]

Why can't I choose what browser I'd like to use?

Re:why no choice?

[sirsnork]

Storage may very well be cheap.. But in the mobile phone market the battery power to run that storage is perhaps the biggest factor for consumers buying phones.. Yeah you can store 500,000 numbers.. but sorry the battery only last 2 hours

Re:why no choice?

[swillden]

Compared to the power used by the transceiver, even in standby, the power consumed by a few additional megabytes of RAM is insignificant. And flash RAM, the most likely option due to it's low cost and non-volatility (and the one mentioned by the poster you responded to), consumes no significant power except when you write or erase.

Storage isn't a problem.

Not just anti-Microsoft

[Mordac the Preventer]

but the key protagonist is really Opera Software, which may be gaining the (initial) upper hand simply because they are not Microsoft.

You don't think it might be because Opera's browser is more suited to mobiles because it's less bloated?

Re:Not just anti-Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

but the key protagonist is really Opera Software, which may be gaining the (initial) upper hand simply because they are not Microsoft.

You don't think it might be because Opera's browser is more suited to mobiles because it's less bloated?

No, I think that "not Microsoft" is a very strong reason for Ericcson, Nokia, etc. to use Opera, even if the Microsoft solution was better.

As we all know, Microsoft has been very successful in the PC world. They bascially dictate to the PC manufacturers what to do to a huge extent - not just technically, but from a marketing perspective too. If, for instance, Dell wanted to sell a Harry Potter themed PC, Microsoft can say no (and have done). Do you think the mobile phone companies want to be in that situation? Do you think they want their products to become commodities with cut-throat margins upon which Microsoft add software with huge margins and upon which they can dictate the price?

I'm not saying this because I am an anti-Microsoft zealot, but because I can really see the business sense of the mobile phone companies not having anything to do with Microsoft. This is one of the biggest problems Microsoft currently faces - the market is moving away from PCs to smaller form devices, and the manufacturers don't want anything to do with Microsoft. This is why we will see Microsoft increasingly experimenting with it's own hardware, like the X-Box. Don't be suprised if you find a Microsoft branded mobile phone released sometime in the next couple of years.

Give me speed first!

[kitsook]

... why would i need a browser when gprs is so expensive and slow?

A smartphone needs familiarity, A cellphone not!

[krazyninja]

Standards and familiarity would not be necessary, as long as people (ok, the majority of the people) tend to use the cellphone AS A cellphone. The moment you start to talk about a cellphone being used a mail client, a pocket computer, a storage device, and other "miniature" PC applications, then standards and familiarity become a must. The point is, nobody knows the market yet. Some analysts say, one device for one function is the best, some say a do-it-all device is better. And the market has not said anything yet.

More of a design issue

[dsanfte]

Personally I always found browsing on WinCE mobile PCs to be complicated by the fact that the browser itself likes to take up a good 35% of the screen space. Packing features in is great guys, but the first browser to give a sense of utility without making me feel like I'm browsing the net through a keyhole is the one that gets my money.

Bad Reasoning...

[NanoGator]

"...which may be gaining the (initial) upper hand simply because they are not Microsoft. "

Err right. That might be true in the /. Community, but the reality is that the vast majority of people either really don't care. Outside of Slashot, the real world isn't exactly vindictive against MS. Not everybody's running around being masochistic just for the sake not using MS stuff. "I spent 3 weeks making my Linux box do whatever my Windows box was already doing!" Whatever.

The reason that Opera could be gaining ground is that they made a good product. That's it. Even in the mobile market. I got a chance to use a Zaurus running Opera, and found it to be a rather pleasant experience. It definitely kicked IE on PocketPC's butt.

However, I'm not exactly picketing Opera to make a PocketPC version. Why? I don't browse the web on my PocketPC. It's a horrible experience. Not because IE is bad (although it is, at least for browsing the web) but because the PDA doesn't give you the resolution and speed you need. It works great with Avantgo, though. No complaints there. With AvantGo, the pages are formatted to PocketPC. As long as I have AvantGo (even works wirelessly), then I don't care if it's Opera or IE, or even Mozilla.

Opera doesn't have a whole lot of chance of gaining ground until PDAs become capable of viewing entire web pages. I don't think that tech is very far away. LCD technology has gotten a lot better in the DPI realm. It won't be more than a year or two before those tiny devices can run at 480 by 640. When that happens, Opera suddenly becomes an interesting alternative.

It's a pity, really. I think Opera deserves more attention on /. than Mozilla as an MS browser alternative. Zealousy abounds I guess. I say that because the only ding I can see against Opera is that it's Ad-supported. I'd care except they show cartoons in that banner window. Heh.

Re:Bad Reasoning...

[nagora]

Err right. That might be true in the /. Community, but the reality is that the vast majority of people either really don't care.

That's a consumer argument. System sellers, i.e. the phone manufacturers, have seen what happened to IBM when they made the mistake of allowing MS to control the "user experience" and they don't want it to happen to them.

As it happens, Opera is a very good browser anyway. If it was open source it would get more support and would develop faster.

TWW

Probably...

[jaseuk]

[i]Can phone makers, and a little Norwegian company called Opera, stop the onslaught?[/i]

My experience with Scandanavian companies is that they like to stick together. They would much rather deal with someone close by or at least in the European Region.

This gives Opera another leg up, as Nokia and Ericson are in the same region.

Jason

Re:Mobile browsers?

[RAMMS EIN]

Actually I would suggest a different approach: make websites decent. For goodness's sake, it's not like mobile phone displays can't display text, and isn't that what hyperTEXT is all about? It's not the fault of hardware manufacturers that designers chose to assume that people have a certain screen size. If they hard-code the width of their pages as 800 pixels and their pages read like crap for someone who has less than that, it's the designers' fault, not anyone else's. It's a decission to make, and both ways have their merits and shortcomings.

Having said that, I don't think most mobile phones are good for web surfing. Reading short messages is ok, but massive amounts of text just do require painful amounts of scrolling on such a small display. Since I like to type, too, I'd rather go for a handheld like those Psion organizers, that have a landscape-oriented display with a fairly decent keyboard under it. If only their hardware wasn't incompatible with everyone else's (save for the styli and batteries) I would buy one (well, money is a concern, too). But that's not a phone, I know.

Anyway, more power to Opera. They've always delivered a great product, and although there seems to be a strong resistance to closed software from the hackers side, and a strong resistance against anything non-MicroSoft on the non-hacker side, I sincerely hope Opera doesn't go the way BeOS did, but either flourishes commercially or goes open-source before the bell tolls for them.

Mozilla is not perfect

[Jacek Poplawski]

Please do not blame Opera for not being open source. I remember I was using Opera in 1998, it was fast, it was small, it was usable. MSIE was always huge, slow, and bloated. But, Netscape wasn't much better. Now, after 4 years, there is free browser - Mozilla. I use it every day. But it's far from perfect. In 3-4 years they added irc client, mail/news stuff, and who knows what else. They completly forgot about speed. MSIE was huge? Compare 1998 MSIE with todays Mozilla.
I am not using Opera, because I have strong computer and I can waste resources for such product like Mozilla. But there are places when Mozilla is not a right thing.