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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."
I guess Gecko is too big to fit a Mozilla based browser into a cell phone, but does anyone know if there are any efforts in the works to get an open source browser that could work in this application?
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
Again, I don't trust Mozilla but on my Handspring I use EudoraWeb and I have one of those Wireless cards.
Also, I suspect that there's going to be some small companies somewhere and all the providers are going to pick a different company and we're going to end up with 3 or 4 small companies that MS is just gonna buy out and gain the upper hand with.
internet like monkeys'
nice too see that Opera took the chance to get into this new market. Of course, M$ now tries to displace them, like they did with Netscape years ago. I hope Opera gets the fair chance they deserve.
OTOH, I really wonder why it is so difficult for M$ to rule the mobile market - can you remember when you first heard about Windows CE? Not much happened in all the years, although M$ is throwing a lot of money at it.
Well if you don't need it don't buy it. If there isn't a need for it, noone will buy it and they'll stop making it.
Personally, I'd want to be able to google anywhere, anytime. Imagine the largest human library in existance accessible from a device that sits in your pocket.
ziproxy is a forwarding (non-caching) proxy that gzips text and HTML files, and reduces the size of images by converting them to low quality JPEGs. It is intended to increase the speed for dial-up Internet connections. Most browsers support gzipped content, so Web pages appear as normal, but as they are only a fraction of their original page size, pages are much quicker to load. Even for browsers that don't support it, hints how to overcome it using SSH port forwarding are included. Images are reduced in size by an average of one third, with only marginal visible image quality loss. It should be used with inetd/xinetd, but if you can't use them, a simple replacement "netd" is provided.
The article has quite an emphasis on companies being able to customize the appearance of the software UI. I'm not a smartphone user, but I don't think the screen appearance has nearly as much glamour/show-off appeal as chic faceplates and such.
My opinion is that Opera's supposed smart "massaging," also mentioned in the article, will be hailed as easier to use than Microsoft's Pocket IE, and thus play a larger end-user role than vendor customizing.
Although, it is nice to see vendors say that the Windows UI is bland, ubiquitous, and doesn't possess the uniqueness that Nokia et al. want.
Business deals and positive/negative corporate assocations usually trump user comments and design staff, IMO, but not always.
Dammit. Make the moille screens decent first.
:) Mobile phones will not replace computers anytime soon for browsing the web, but the SSR (Small-Screen Rendering) is a step in the right direction. It will make it easier to browse websites in the mobile phone. No more need to scroll the screen sideways. Anyway, see the mobile browser as a complement rather than replacement for the real thing. :)
You want to walk around with a clunky 15" screen? Well, not me.
Opera seems to be taking this market a little more seriously....
The latest beta (version 7) has the ability to render the screen as if viewed on a small screen (press shift-F11 to toggle the view)... This makes testing instantly easier.
I just love the opera browser (mouse gestures, tabbed browsing..etc) and have gladly payed for the privilage since opera 5, but thats just my choice..isn't that what this is about.
There is no way that IE has the market tied down at the moment because they don't control the platform that it sits on. This will be a much better test of browser preference than the artificial desktop browser choice, because MS don't control the platform (symbian platform that is)
Also games are very popular on cells too. While I do not see the appeal, many seem to. I bought the most "business-like" phone I found, yet it still comes with 3 games. It's getting pretty hard to find "just a cellphone" without all the bloat. Try to find me a cellphone without Games, Calendar, Downloadable songs, on-screen animations, WAP, iMode or anything that doesn't belong on a cellphone. Only a contact list, talking function and SMS function... Find me such a beast and I'll agree there still are "just cellphones".
Besides, don't forget the Japanese. They surely seem to love iMode and they fancy cellphones.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The article actually says that Opera does better job of displaying web pages too. They show example of Opera displaying standard and popular web site (designed for large screens) very nicely on a small screen. They describe how mobile IE displays the same page much less nicely, requiring lots of scrolling.
So, in addition to being leaner, Opera is also impressing with superior results at displaying on small screens. The fact that it's not MS is just icing on the cake -- certainly not the main attraction.
Beep! Wrong answer. Here's what Google tells about this particular urban legend.
Funny thing is, I worked at GM and that story was constantly being spread around the grapevine as actual fact. One group used the tale as an analogy in their newsletter, again, misrepresenting the story as fact.
:)
I've also seen the story used on TV news shoes being misrepresented as actual fact to demonstrate similarities between current corporate blunders and that.
Odd how urban legends become 'fact' isn't it?
My journal has hot
Standards and familiarity are not the same thing. "Familiarity" in the context of this topic/article is what MS hopes phone manufactures will figure customers want (eg "better put MS on our phones b/c our customers are used to using Windows"). Standards are what will make it possible for customers to have options in what they use because without standards someone like MS can lock competitors out by making them incompatible with the main.
It's asinine to talk about MS "familiarity" as a standard because MS is the antithesis of standards -- that's what they do -- take things which are standard, leverage its monopoly on the desktop to propogate incompatibility to fragment things, and then sit and then just hang out till everything's so fscked that everyone has to revert to whatever MS has got, with innovator's suffocated to the wayside.
I wouldn't read Slashdot on my phone, but I do use the Net exclusively for looking up train times, directory enquiries, checking if a plane I have to meet is delayed. I would like to do these from a mobile. The people I do them with already have classic web interfaces. It is extra work for them to do WAP, imode etc. Some will do the extra work, some won't. But I can access them all if I have standard HTML on my phone.
By the way, Opera7.0 beta (Windows only) can be put into small creen mode. It is worth downloading if you have got reasonable bandwidth. The browser works very well for plain-vanilla HTML that I have tried. Screws up a bit on javascript pop-up menus. This migh well be welcone pressure back to clean, simple web pages designed to give you information instead of high-energy jazzy pages intended to impress you with the provider and his web designer without telling you anything.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
After 4 or 5 hours of going around and visiting the same sites, etc., the memory usage was around 15M for IE, 25M for Mozilla, and a whopping 35M for Opera.
Now, IE may be excused because a lot of the resources it uses are already factored into the rest of the system, but Opera using a whole 10M more than Mozilla is just unconscionable.
People feel comfortable already with phones. It's technology they understand. Same goes for cell phones. As cell phones become more like computers, people don't have the same fear-factor going into them like they do PCs. They feel that they understand it already, unlike PCs.
Like the article says, people want a personal experience with a cell phone. It's how you stay in contact with your circle of friends. People don't want or care about a "familiar interface." To them, it's not a computer, it's a phone.
I see cell phones replacing the PDA and the laptop. The truly personal computer will come from simple, functional, portable devices growing better, not from hard-to-operate PCs shrinking. Maybe Microsoft will lose it's monopoly this way.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Maybe it's not entirely different or complicated... It seems like Daniel Glazman managed to do this transformation with only javascript dom and css manipulations on Mozilla. In fact, he's made it into a bookmarklet and you just click on it when browsing a page to activate it.
...and to quote him from the page: "Well, sorry to say, but that's not a very big deal. There is nothing magic there and I can prove it right now. Let's write a stylesheet that does most of the job..."
...it lacks MANY interesting functions such as rotate (90 degres) for a landscape view. It's really sad when you get a page designed with a certain "fixed width" in mind, you need to keep scrolling from right to left and you can quickly give you a headache while reading..! There is no copy/paste which is *really* annoying when you want to cut/paste long URL's and it doesn't do tabs.
For those reasons, I'd say that Konqueror is a much better choice. Both of them run on the Zaurus (K runs on OpenZaurus, which BTW kicks azz)
IE on a handheld? No way, I don't want to permanently have a 512M CF in it just to run IE!
-- Leeeter than leet
No, not recognition of the brand and fear of them, the brand itself. MS values it's Windows brand highly. A product is no good for them unless it prominently carries the Windows brand on it. That's why they're so adamant about retaining their logos and appearance on the desktop. The problem is, to a phone manufacturer thier brand is incredibly important, much more so than the hardware and firmware in the phone. If you pick up a Nokia phone and it doesn't have their brand clearly visible, if instead the most clearly visible label is some other company's, this is not in Nokia's best interest. I don't see any way MS can shell out enough money to convince the cel-phone makers to give up their brands, so I don't think MS is going to make much headway with them. That's undoubtably why Sendo switched away from them: technical flexibility aside, the MS licensing terms probably prohibited Sendo from removing all traces of the Windows brand and making it appear to be a completely Sendo phone.