Showing posts with label Opera. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Opera. Show all posts

Monday, 12 December 2011

Opera previews Opera 12 and Opera Mobile 11.5

Opera previews Opera 12 and Opera Mobile 11.5

Opera has previewed new versions of its browsers at a press event in Oslo, including a sneak preview of Opera 12, its desktop browser.

Opera Mini 6.5 and Opera Mobile 11.5 will now show you exactly how much data you have used and how much data you will save using Opera Turbo.

That's the company's web compression tech that crushes pages on its own servers - meaning your device doesn't have to download as much data.

Both are available for download from today, initially for Android.

Opera mobile

"A lot of people don't realise how much money they can save on data traffic. People naturally want an easy way to measure how much data they use," said Lars Boilesen, head of Opera Software.

Opera 12

Also shown at the UpNorthWeb event in Oslo was Opera 12, the new version of the company's desktop browser - an alpha is available from Thursday.

Opera's Christen Krogh took TechRadar through some of the features of Opera 12.

"Firstly there's hardware-accelerated graphics featuring WebGL. What we have here is a web app that connects via JavaScript to the device driver and enables you to control the camera. The main change in Opera 12 is the internals, we reimplemented completely our HTML parser and reworked how JavaScript is handled.

Opera 12

"When it gets a web page, it builds up an HTML tree structure. Part of the HTML5 specification is how to specify how browsers behave when they build up this information," Krogh continued.

Opera 12

Saving data

Krogh also demonstrated Opera Mobile 11.5 running on Android 3.x Honeycomb.

"It feels incredibly efficient, with smooth scrolling. You'll never see a checkerboard on this browser again. With Opera Turbo enabled... you see the data savings." We saw 61 per cent saved on a single page, although Opera says compression of up to 90 per cent is possible.

Opera mobile

"In a recent Nielsen study they looked at the time spent on mobile devices in the browser versus time spent in applications. The time spent in the browser is three times longer [than in apps]."

Opera also talked about the data processed by its servers to offload processing from devices running the Opera browser - the company handles more than 12 petabytes of data per month. That's 80 billion web pages.

"If you consider a web page to have 35-40 page elements, then you'll find our servers are executing more than a million HTTP requests per second," continued Krogh. "All those 200 million users standing on each other's shoulders would almost touch the moon."

Other new features in Opera Mini and Opera Mobile include an update to the Opera Presto rendering engine, improved network performance and smaller JavaScript engine memory usage.

Opera Mini and Opera Mobile for Android are available for free in the Android Market.

Monday, 7 November 2011

Opera adds data usage tracker to all its mobile browsers

Opera has announced that it is helping its users keep track of their mobile data allowance by adding a data usage tracker to its mobile browsers.

The new service is part of its Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers – with Opera Mini updated to 6.5 for iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Symbian S60 and Java-enabled phones and the Opera Mobile 11.5 browser is now also available on Symbian S60. These updates bring it into line with the company's Android versions.

Save the data

The new data tracking option can be found under Help in the browser's options with Phillip Grønvold, Product Manager for Mobile, Opera Software explaining: "The data counter instantly shows people how much they have saved."

In other Opera-related news, it seems that Android's own web browser, brilliantly titled Browser, has overtaken Opera Mini in the mobile web stakes.

According to Engadget, however, both have been given the smack down by Safari, which now has an impressive 62.2 percent mobile browsing market share.

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Saturday, 17 September 2011

Opera Mini browser submitted to iPhone App Store

Opera's super-speedy Opera Mini mobile browser has finally been submitted to the iPhone App Store.

We first got wind of the iPhone-flavoured browser at Mobile World Congress, where Opera noted it is "six times faster than Safari".

For this reason, it will be interesting to see if the browser is accepted, considering Apple rules its app store with something of an iron fist – especially when it comes to allowing web browsers on the store.

Customised and stylised

"The Opera Mini for iPhone sneak peek during MWC told us that we have something special," explained Jon von Tetzchner, Co-founder, Opera Software in the company's release.

"Opera has put every effort into creating a customised, stylised, feature-rich and highly responsive browser that masterfully combines iPhone capabilities with Opera's renowned web experience, and the result is a high performing browser for the iPhone."

The Opera Mini browser is already on the Android Market and for BlackBerry handsets, albeit in beta form. It's also available as a full version for WinMo phones.

One of the features the browser seems to be lacking is the ability to use the iPhone's pinch-to-zoom feature.

But it seems that this could be something that is added to the app later on. If there is a 'later on'.