Opera News & Articles

Smartphones and tablets are now a mainstay in the enterprise setting, and yet most carriers are moving toward capped bandwidth plans rather than unlimited schemes. With media-rich websites resulting in soaring data costs, a business' or user's best bet is to minimize data consumption through compression. The Opera Mini 6.5 release promises to save up to 90% of bandwidth.

Our favorite cross-platform browser just got leaner and meaner, and grew a few new toys. Opera (news, site) has just released version 11.50, which comes with a few enhancements that might have been inspired by some of Opera's competitors. But when you're at the #5 position in terms of market share, you can take a few liberties with your design and still call it a stroke of genius.

Web browsers are often a highly personal choice. You would usually have a preference based on speed, feature set and compatibility. With the recent release of IE9 and Firefox 4 claiming to be faster than ever, tests have been run to determine speed and stability on each.

In many ways people are looking forward to HTML 5 and its expanded list of features. However, there's a number of aspects that have privacy advocates worried. In particular, people are concerned about geolocation. Fortunately the W3C (news, site) is working on solutions.

It's a mobile epidemic! And trust us, "epidemic" is in no way too strong a word. Opera's mobile browser, Opera Mini, proves it with recent numbers: for the first time ever, users viewed more than 10 billion pages in one month according to the State of the Mobile Web report by Opera.

Opera (news, site) got on the mobile hype way back in 1998 when they developed their first mobile browser. Since then (especially in recent times), they've done a pretty good job at staying in the spotlight. The mobile browser has seen a growth in user base of over 4.2% globally since May 2009, and over 143% over the past year. Their page views have increased by over 8 percent over the figures for the month of May and for the first time, breached the 10 billion mark in June.

Opera's numbers reflect a quickly growing trend: “More than 10 billion page views in one month underscore that the Web is already the platform of choice for mobile devices," explained Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. "Web standards provide a more efficient way to create flawless sites across all devices."

If you're ready to join the movement, it looks like Opera's a good place to start. The self-proclaimed "most popular mobile Web browser" is currently available as version 4.2 and features personalized skins, better video support and synced notes. Check it out here.

Opera (news, site) was talking about re-inventing the Web recently and its latest release, version 10, isn't just a browser. It's a whole new technology called Opera Unite, featuring a web server in the browser.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• When 140 Characters Can't Contain Your Tweet
• Social Media Empowering Iranian Citizen Journalists
• Facebook Grants Usernames, Crowd Goes Crazy
• Opera Aims to Re-Invent the Web With Opera Unite

With Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) (news, site) now in wide distribution, we thought it a good time to talk about a few ways that with a little bit of applied knowledge you can save some of your valuable time. Come, take a few minutes to tinker with us.

Mobile browsing is one of the few boom areas for telcos, but browser competition is stifled as owners traditionally stick with whatever comes with their phone -- Safari on the iPhone, IE for Windows Mobile, Chrome for Android, Opera on everything else and so on.

Attempting to stir up some competition is Fennec, the cunning little fox from Mozilla that has had an extensive Alpha, going back to last October and is now available in beta, hopefully having recovered from last month's abortive pre-beta test.

With the home computer browser wars in full swing, the fighting has been taken to the mobile front. Bitstream has entered the melee with a public beta release of BOLT -- a loud, in all CAPS (yet lightweight) mobile browser full of speed and attitude.

The mobile browser war has been waging on with recent releases from the likes of Mozilla, Opera and Skyfire. And while each has been keeping up with functionality and developments in their own right, last week the contender likeliest to come out on top stepped onto the battle field and got blown to bits.

What we’re referring to, of course, is Mozilla’s pre-alpha release of Firefox Mobile, a.k.a. Fennec. The early test version was made available to HTC Touch Pro, but to the dismay of many an excited mobile enthusiast, wouldn’t load any Web pages.

HTML, the core syntax markup for the web, is in transition. With new browsers, new technologies, the realization that updates and changes are needed has taken hold. A new version of HTML is in the works. And Adobe has joined the ranks of Opera, Mozilla and Apple to help out.

With security issues plaguing the end of 2008, the browser wars are back in full swing. This time Google steps up to the plate, opening the new year of battle with their Chrome 2.0 pre-beta trial.

If Macworld wasn't enough to excite you all, worry not, the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) kicks off today in Las Vegas and runs through January 11. The all-star lineup includes our dear friends at Opera who, aside from a few exciting happenings around their mobile broswer, remained relatively quiet in 2008. But because they spent the bulk of that down time working on their new SDK (unveiled at CES), we're willing to forgive and forget.

Internet Explorer has long been the topic of negative conversation in the tech community. And today is no different as a major security flaw has been announced that affects IE5 through the new IE8 beta.

The flaw allows serious and far reaching attacks that are not just theoretical in nature. According to sources this particular issue is already in wide use with attempts to steal game passwords. There are a reported 10,000+ websites infected with the code necessary to take advantage of this breach.