Opera

This week Opera Software announced a deal with Appia Inc, which last month rebranded its name from PoacketGear, to provide access for its mobile browser users to a mobile application store.

In the pilot stage the store had over 15 million users in February, achieving more than 700,000 downloads per day, and establishing it among top 10 mobile application stores globally, says Opera.

The revenue-sharing deal between Opera and Appia lasts three years. The deal doubles Appia's 100 million subscriber-base.
 

Opera demonstrated a new touch version of its popular Internet browser developed specifically for tablets and netbooks. The company posted a video footage on YouTube showcasing the browser’s features. Further details will be elicited at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. But the two things are known already: the browser will run on Android powered devices with no version planned for the iPad. Haarvard Moen of Opera says that the browser is based on a new 10.5 version of Opera's Mobile browser.

Opera Software reported in its new survey that in Nigeria, South Africa and Indonesia over 90% of users aged 10 to 27 use mobile phones as their primary means to access the Internet rather than smartphones which are not very popular in emerging markets.

The results of the survey challenged the common belief that the future of mobile browsing will be driven by the smartphones use globally.

According to the latest data from StatCounter by Pingdom Google’s web browser experienced high growth catching up to Firefox this year. Over the past 12 months Chrome’s market share rose from 3.7 percent in September of 2009 to 11.5% by September this year.

As the graph shows Safari, Opera, and "Other" even taken together cannot match Google’s brainchild.

Opera unveiled this week its final Opera 10.6 version which claims to feature more speed, fixed vulnerabilities and addition of a number of new elements.

Opera has included several HTML5 features into its new flagship web browser. Now Opera 10.6 supports Web Workers, the Geolocation API and better runs offline web apps, and it has
improved support for the Cross-Document Messaging spec.

Opera unveiled the preview its next browser release, 10.6 - featuring support for geolocation and royalty-free WebM video and HTML5 offline web apps.

The app is supposed to be the next major milestone for Linux and BSD users, since Opera is skipping an official 10.5 release for those platforms. As the company assures the new version of the JavaScript engine is up to 75% per cent faster

Mozilla has announced the introduction of a web service that allows users of different browsers including Internet Explorer, Chrome, Opera, and Safari to check whether plugins for their web surfing applications are up-to-date and don’t contain bugs or vulnerabilities.

By coming to the page http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/plugincheck/ a user can see the report that shows the analysis of all the installed plugins. As it appears some of the plugins are still in research stage by Mozilla and there is no firm conclusion of whether they are safe or not.

Microsoft has updated its Internet Explorer 9 preview in line with its promise to introduce updates to the app every eight weeks until releases the official public beta version of the platform. But the timetable for the release has not been specified again.

"The Platform Preview continues to be the thinnest possible wrapper around the Web platform, and as such is not intended for general purpose browsing," cautioned Dean Hachamovich, the browser team's general manager, in an entry on the IE blog today.

Opera has announced the release of its latest browser for Mac machines claiming the new application is ten times faster based on speed comparisons between Opera 10.52 and Opera 10.10.

"To all Mac users who value fast browsing, please meet Opera," CEO Lars Boilesen says. "Opera is a consistent performer on even the most congested networks, giving people the fastest browsing experience, coupled with a powerful feature set that is finely attuned to the needs of Mac users."

As Microsoft started offering European users a choice in browser with a so-called ballot screen Opera Software has recorded a sharp increase in downloads of its popular Internet browser (10.5).

The company reports that over half of the European downloads of Opera’s latest browser come directly from that Choice Screen on an average basis.

Thus, the downloads have more than doubled from the normal figures. Earlier this month Opera boasted a triple increase in downloads.

Microsoft is on the threshold of announcing its new and unprecedented version of Internet Explorer 9 browser. The company itself provided no confirmation of the move but many experts and observers are anticipating that the new browser will be supporting open web standards after all.

For a long time Microsoft has been criticized for declining to fully support open web standards. Many critics believe that the shift towards open standards will yield high returns for the software giant.

Norway browser developer Opera Software plans to introduce next week a new version of its Mini browser for Apple's iPhone.

The company said that the browser will be presented at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona next week. It will feature up to six times faster download speeds than Apple's own browser, and up to 10 times smaller data traffic.

"We have not submitted it yet to the Apple App Store. However, we hope that Apple will not deny their users a choice in Web browsing experience," said Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder of Opera.
 

According to the report released by Opera which covers the trends of the mobile usage of the social networking websites Facebook was found as the most visited social network on the mobile Web, but Twitter’s growth has surged even faster in 2009.

The report reveals that unique users at Facebook jumped up over 600% during 2009. The site thus surpassed VKontakte, the Russian social network that was formerly the most popular among Opera Mini users (the browser is quite popular in Russia and Eastern Europe).

As Opera announced today, it has purchased privately held US company AdMarvel , Mobile Advertising Company , that has developed a product suite that manages how ads are delivered to mobile phones, for $ 8 million.

Meantime, Opera is paying up to an additional $15 million if certain financial targets are met during the next 24 months, according to a filing with the Oslo Børs.

Opera has already been using AdMarvel's product suite when testing mobile advertising on its Mini browser and was delighted with the results.

The latest version of Opera browser which is still in the pre-alpha stage was developed for Windows and Mac. It is the first browser that's not powered by Webkit to approach JavaScript rendering speeds previously reached only by Chrome and Safari.