Opera make a browser specifically for the iPad

I make no secret of the fact that I am a massive Opera fan. They have produced a browser just for tablets.

I applaud the decision - which recognises that a touch only interface impacts the User Interaction.

However, given the availability of hybrid devices (ie tablets that have keyboard docks) I'm not sure of the merits of this being a stand alone app - ie separate from standard Opera. Surely this would be best as a 'mode of use' option? It would be great if Opera sensed whether the user was in tablet mode or in laptop mode (ie with keyboard) and popped up an invitation to switch into an alternative user mode.

I would be most interested in feedback as to how Opera Tablet works.

The power of Opera's caching and its business model

The Register's journalist visited Opera and wrote this very interesting story, Shhh... Opera holds the web's most valuable secret.



Some history of Opera's web compression technology 
End users know this as Opera Mini:

Six years ago, two Opera engineers came up with a way of saving mobile operators money, by compressing web pages and sending them over slow, high-latency 2G cellular links in binary chunks. WAP had tried to do the same thing with WSP, but nowhere near as efficiently, and WAP required websites to created content in the WML format.

Opera's insight was that CPU time on servers was cheap, but on a humble mobile phone, CPU and bandwidth were very expensive. A web page may need to talk to 20 other servers, and some of these need to talk to other servers. This bricolage then needs to be reassembled locally, a task that has increasingly taxed CPUs over the years. (A CSS file contains conflicting positioning information using several co-ordinate systems - these are resolved locally.)

Opera initially offered the technology as a caching proxy to operators, called Mobile Accelerator. Then it decided to offer it directly to end users, via a new small lightweight browser that talked directly to a proxy hosted by Opera itself [ie Opera Mini].

Opera's Web Cache is growing 
From the report by El Reg:

Google currently handles 85 billion transactions a month. From 2008 to 2009 Opera grew from 21 billion to 36.9 billion. It is growing faster than Google, and at some point in the not-too-distant future, on current trends, Opera will overtake it.

Opera's Revenue Model
The crux of the article is that Opera has chosen not to monetise this advantage (eg by injecting ads into this cache).

The article lists Opera's revenue sources:

1. licensing and royalties 
2. income from active users and transactions 
3. "internet economy" income such as driving referrals to search engines 

Opera 11 is coming soon

Well, you would have thought that by v11 of a product, it would have become pretty insipid. The Opera browser remains at the very forefront of internet technology - it generates raw innovations that appear in other browsers in 18 months to 2 years' time.

And, in case you can't tell, I'm a huge Opera fan.


This review from The Reg, Inside Opera 11: extensions and benchmarks, is generous - extensions are one area that Opera has lagged. I only hope that enough developers engage with Opera's platform - I don't have a single Opera Widget installed, as they appear to be only fripperies. I hope extensions are different.

Opera's State of the Mobile Web Report

Some interesting stats from Opera's State of the Mobile Web Report from April 2010 (courtesy of Opera itself):

• In April 2010, Opera Mini users generated over 398 million MB of data for operators worldwide (ie compressed data). Data in Opera Mini is compressed by up to 90%. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 3.7 petabytes of data in April.

iPhone Stats

• Opera Mini for iPhone was downloaded more than one million times in its first day of availability on 14th April 2010.
• In April 2010, there were more than 2.6 million unique users of Opera Mini on the iPhone (from April 13-30). (That's 17 days after launch!).