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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."
Dammit. Make the moille screens decent first.
...um...like...a sig...
Why can't I choose what browser I'd like to use?
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
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.
Surely all we need is a very simple system that can deal with sending short messages, possibly with links to other short messages.
I have no desire to read Slashdot through my phone thanks. I need a decent screen. I may want occasional bits and pieces of information, but this will be very short pieces of info like news headlines. Internet cellphones simply try to do far too much, and be far too much like a desktop PC.
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'
..If for nothing other than the fact they have a huge ad below this story =D.
SteveB.
... why would i need a browser when gprs is so expensive and slow?
"Do something man. Right now."
It's probably difficult for Microsoft to rule the mobile-marked because they can't seem to find a cellphone with 256 MB of DDR-RAM and a 1 GHz CPU. Not to mention a physical-media like a harddrive for swapping when you are dialing long-distance numbers.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
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.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
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.
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.
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.
``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.
"...which may be gaining the (initial) upper hand simply because they are not Microsoft. "
/. 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.
/. 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.
Err right. That might be true in the
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
"Derp de derp."
[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
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.
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)
Clippy: I see your trying to make an emergency phone call...
User: Dammit, my cellphone bluescreened again!
Slashdot user: I bet I could h4x0R the modem and form a cellphone beowulf cluster, but someone said ??? = PROFIT! and then all the cellphones belonged to Bill...
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)
On Sendo's leaving Microsoft and using Symbian, where they get the source and are allowed to tweak with it:
Was it a technology problem -- did Microsoft's software work? "It was a not a technology issue," she said. "I cannot go into all the details about it, but our business model is to offer very customized phones so they have something to distinguish themselves in the marketplace, which we cannot offer if we don't have the source code."
Microsoft dismissed this explanation. In an e-mail, Suwanjindar said that Microsoft's "shared source" model "provides partners with the APIs [application programming interfaces] they need in order to customize and develop applications for our platform."
Sendo: We don't like your deal, it isn't flexible enough.
Microsoft: We'll give you our API's.
Sendo: API's aren't as flexible as the full source code.
Microsoft (handwaving): API's will do.
Sendo: No, they won't.
Microsoft (handwaving again): APIs will do.
Sendo: No, they won't! You think you're some kind of jedi, waving your hand like that?
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.
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
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.
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.
...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.