QuirksBlog - Opera Mobile/Mini

6 April 2013

Blinkbait

Permalink | in Chrome, Opera Mobile/Mini

A few more Blink-related links. (This article’s title was ~~stolen~~ borrowed from Thomas van Zuijlen.)

13 February 2013

Opera switching to WebKit: thoughts and guesses

OK, so Opera is going to move to WebKit. I didn’t see that coming, despite the recent news about a WebKit-based browser on iOS (can’t port Presto there, so of course it’s WebKit).

What does all this mean? Hard to tell. Here are a few thoughts and guesses.

28 July 2010

Opera’s problems on mobile

Permalink | in Opera Mobile/Mini
14 comments (closed)

In the mobile browser space all the advanced browsers are based on WebKit. That’s fine — WebKit is an excellent rendering engine — but if all browsers were based on WebKit I would start to worry about a monoculture. At least some browsers should be based on other rendering engines, as far as I’m concerned.

The only serious mobile candidate for “other rendering engine” is Opera. But I’m starting to wonder whether it can keep up with the WebKit browsers. With the recent release of Samsung Dolfin Opera Mobile has firmly dropped from third-best to fourth-best mobile browser on my list.

The problem is not that Opera isn’t innovating. It is. But I’m starting to wonder about the direction that innovation is taking.

18 February 2010

Browser news from the Mobile World Congress

Permalink | in BlackBerry, Google, HTML5 apps, Mobile, Nokia, Opera Mobile/Mini, Samsung
8 comments (closed)

Yesterday evening I returned from my fourth foreign trip this year. This time I went to the Mobile World Congress, the annual Barcelona-based get-together of the mobile industry, and I can tell you, it’s something else.

This post gives an overview of announcements by mobile players that might be of interest to web developers. There’s an incredible lot of it, too, because every single major mobile player except Apple feels that MWC is the ultimate forum for major announcements.

If you know of more news, or have links to additional information, please leave a comment.

I was there because Vodafone had invited me to sit on a panel in a technical “embedded conference” about W3C Widgets and related technologies. The concept can use some fine-tuning; I’m hoping to do some of that in the future. I was there mainly to stress that the mobile browser situation is not as simple as it looks. THERE IS NO WEBKIT ON MOBILE!
While I was at it I also invented guerilla browser testing.