opera

What you do with your mobile Web browser may depend heavily on which mobile operating system you're on, if the results of a new study by Opera can be extrapolated to other browsers. In its State of the Mobile Web monthly report for September 2011, released first to CNET today, Opera revealed that Opera Mini users were more likely to use it for search on Android, for travel and tourism on iOS, for sports and technology on BlackBerry, for news on Windows Phones, and for social networking on feature phones.

Opera and its subsidiary AdMarvel unveiled not only a … Read more

Some Android browsers deliver all the content, while others cut back for faster browsing. Choosing the correct browser for your connection type each time can become tedious--but there's a quick fix.

With Smart Browser Chooser, a free app on the Android Market, you can decide which browser is used based on your connection speed. All it takes is a couple minutes of setup and whether you're on Wi-Fi, 3G, or 2G, your Android device will know which browser to load for the best user experience.

Note: In order to use this app, you need … Read more

OSLO, Norway--The rise of Android and its built-in browser could be seen as very bad news for Opera Software, a company that's built a business with a mobile browser popular on the very low-end devices that Android smartphones often replace.

But Opera sees things differently: Android is a major part of its plan for future growth. And a product due in 2012 that marries the Norwegian company's two mobile browsers, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile, will lead the company's defense of its mobile-browsing stronghold, CNET can report exclusively.

Opera Mobile is a traditional browser, with an engine … Read more

OSLO, Norway--Opera Software took the hardware acceleration plunge today with the release of its first alpha version of Opera 12, code-named Wahoo.

Hardware acceleration offers a range of benefits to Web browsers--faster performance, lower battery consumption, and new features that would be otherwise impractical. So it's no surprise that browser makers--catalyzed in part by Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9--have been rebuilding their engines to support the idea.

But Opera, while not the first with hardware acceleration, thinks it's got a competitive approach. It uses hardware for everything its Vega display engine handles--font display, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) effects, … Read more

A new Web page that tests browser security has crowned Internet Explorer 9 the most secure among the five major players. The only catch is that the page itself comes from Microsoft.

Dubbed "Your Browser Matters," the new page checks a browser to determine how well it fares against phishing attacks and other types of socially engineered malware. The page then assigns the browser a score based on a scale of 0 to 4.

Looking at the major browsers, Internet Explorer 9 received a perfect 4 out 4, while IE8 earned a 3. The latest versions of Firefox (… Read more

OSLO, Norway--Opera Software is a browser company, but its chief technology officer believes the modern Web still could learn a thing or two from publishing technology that's hundreds of years old.

At the company's Up North Web press event here, CTO Haakon Wium Lie showed off a new standard he proposed that could give Web pages more of the feel of printed pages. A document too big for a single screen, instead of getting a scroll bar, would be split across several pages, and people can navigate among them with gestures--swiping left and right to go forward and … Read more

OSLO, Norway--Opera Software today released new versions of its mobile browsers, Opera Mini 6.5 and Opera Mobile 11.5, which show users exactly how much of a data-plan diet the software is enabling.

One of the top selling points of Opera Mobile and Mini is that when a person loads a Web page, Opera's servers fetch the data, boil it down, and send a smaller version to the mobile phones or tablets on which the browsers are running. That can save a lot of data, which is a big deal both for mobile operators whose networks are afflicted … Read more

OSLO--The next version of Opera Software's browser will get a major graphics-hardware boost, an approach that's been spreading to browsers keen to increase battery life, improve performance, and enable new features.

"Everything is accelerated," said Jan Standal, Opera's vice president of desktop products, in an interview today at the company's Up North Web press event here about Opera 12. "The whole user interface."

Specifically, that means hardware acceleration for Cascading Style Sheets transitions and animations, for Canvas 2D drawing, and for text, he said. And Opera 12 gets support for the WebGL … Read more

Among Amazon's announcements today is that the retail and cloud services giant is stepping into the browser market with a new Web browser that ships in its upcoming Android-based tablet.

That new browser is called Silk, and it's the latest effort to make Web browsing faster, especially on portable devices where the hardware is typically slower than what a user might have on a desktop or notebook computer. It can also learn how you browse the Web, and extend battery life by putting some of the heavy lifting in the cloud, Amazon says.

The company is putting the weight of its massive cloud services infrastructure behind the browser to make up for potential hardware shortcomings. While the Kindle Fire tablet ships with a dual-core processor that's capable of running games and other applications, the company says that users have come to expect a certain amount of speed on the desktop that isn't always there on mobile devices.

Amazon's solution is what it calls a "split browser," a method that makes use of local processing for some things, while tapping into its Elastic Compute Cloud to process and serve up content faster than users might get it directly from the device. … Read more