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Google Default Search For Opera Mobile
sayanchak writes "Reuters reports that Opera Software has agreed that Google will be the default partner for its mobile Internet browsers. Google will be the default search partner for the mobile browsers, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini." From the article: "Oslo-based Opera Software is a tiny competitor of Microsoft in the Internet browser market, but the fast-growing part of its business is in browsers for mobile phones and other mobile electronic devices."
The Reuters article is light on details. How much is Opera going to make by signing with Google?
"Oslo-based Opera Software is a tiny competitor of Microsoft in the Internet browser market, but the fast-growing part of its business is in browsers for mobile phones and other mobile electronic devices."
Yet again, we're comparing everything to bloody Microsoft! Opera are a tiny competitor to Microsoft!? Everybody is! So why can't we have Opera duke it out against Firefox and Safari for a change? We know IE is crap, we know it comes with every installation of Windows, and we know that Windows accounts for a huge percentage of shipped OSes, so can we have a little less obvious journalism - less on the obvious victories of today and more about the battlefields of tomorrow please...
Why oh why is software always be compared to the equivalent product with the greatest market share, regardless of technical merit?
Please, can we just get off the market share thing, it's irrelevant and pointless, as long as you're using what's best.
From what I recall, Microsoft doesn't really have that big a foothold in the handheld browser area. So unlike in the PC world, where MS is the defacto standard, they cant just muscle in and make everyone use their browser. I would liken it more to their recent attempts at getting into the console business via the XBOX. They actually have competition, and can't just win by making the thing cheap.
The problem with mobile devices isn't that they have low bandwidth or weak hardware (well, arguably), but that network access is extremely high latency. Most web sites are a chore to use through a mobile interface. If Opera's Mobile Browser has full blown ``AJAX'' support, some sites become much more pleasant to use. Notably, GMAIL. No doubt this is what Google has in mind...
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What the fuck are you talking about?
"AJAX" still has to do a full HTTP request, so if the latency is high it'll take just as long as reloading the whole god damn page.
And no, I doubt gmail was designed with mobile phones in mind.
AJAX's problems, however, are compounded when the underlying transport is so slow. If a user navigates away from a page with an outstanding background request, or if they issue a second request while the first is outstanding, the results are effectively undefined. :
Umm.. if the user navigates away from the page, the request is ABORTED and absolutely NOTHING happens from the users' POV. Dumbass. And if they issue a second request, well then your pretty AJAX-code better be able to handle it.
(Where the hell do all these AJAX-n00bs come from?)
How do you know if one of the developers works for Google and happened to work on that part for the OSS browsers?
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
I have to disagree with your subject line...I happen to be posting this using Opera mini on a Motorola v635, and though it's far from a laptop, I still find the browsing experience more than satisfactory...even on graphics-intensive pages like Slashdot. That said, I'd like to be able to change the default search. Google is a great search engine, but I'd prefer to run my queries on Wikipedia first.