Opera Mobile for Android: Nearly there!
Opera 11 set for Firefoxy extensions
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
The Opera Mobile browser will be available in Google's Android Marketplace within the next month and the upcoming Opera 11 desktop browser will offer Firefox-like extensions.
Opera chief development officer Christen Krogh showed the new Opera Mobile Android browser this morning at a company press event in Oslo. The Norwegian outfit already offers an Android incarnation of its low-bandwidth mobile browser, Opera Mini, but it has yet to introduce its full-fledged mobile browser on Google's kinda open source OS.
Opera Mobile for Android will handle full pinch-and-zoom gestures and offer support for graphics hardware acceleration. The current version of Opera Mobile offers only a limited zoom tool.
Opera Mini – which officially debuted on Android in July – taps into Opera proxy servers that intercept and compress web pages before sending them down to the client. This speeds download times, making the browser suitable for slower web connections and lower amounts of memory. Opera Mobile can make use of the same proxy servers, but it can also access web servers directly, providing unfettered access to the net.
According to Krogh, Opera Mobile for Android is one of the most common requests among Opera users. During his presentation, Krogh also demonstrated an incarnation of Opera Mini that offers full pinch and zoom gestures, another frequent request.
Krogh then revealed that on the desktop, Opera 11 will offer extensions, a way for third-party developers to tack additional tools onto the browser. The company is already running extensions in an alpha version of the browser, but this is not yet publicly available. The alpha will be available "soon" here.
Following Krogh's speech, Chief technology officer Håkon Wium Lie said that extensions are "ripe" for standardization, and Opera 11's extensions will be based on the W3C Widget specifications. Developers will be able to create extensions using open standards such as HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript and supported APIs. The company has also "tried to make it easy" to port extensions from other browser platforms such as Firefox and Chrome. ®
COMMENTS
You use Chrome
after using Opera? I have to ask, WHY??
Anyone smart enough to have used Opera will know it's 10x the browser Chrome is.
Perhaps if you had tried Opera 8 or something. But today Opera 10.6x trumps Chrome in every possible way.
re: Well isn't that strange...
The problem here is not the product, but public perception.
Opera is a fine product that doesn't really need extensions (most of the good ones are already built in to Opera anyway), and extensions DO add bloat, incompatibilities, security issues.
HOWEVER, a lot of people don't look at Opera because it does not support them. When education fails, you have to follow the crowd it seems.
That said, from the sounds of it, the Opera extensions will be standards compliant too, using open web standards and languages. So it could be a nice half-way house.
Not strange at all
"After listening to the Opera crown harp on about how extensions only slow down a browser, bloat it up, etc, and how they're totally unnecessary in a piece of software as perfect as Opera, the company go and add extensions."
Extensions DO slow down Firefox. This is a fact. But if Opera has figured out a way to AVOID that, then that allows them to support extensions AND be fast.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Top 10 SIEM implementer’s checklist
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
