In November 2005 Opera Mini went public in a limited trial offered to only Sweden and Norway. A few months later, January 2006, it would be released globally, and this month Opera is celebrating 4 years of having their wickedly awesome Opera Mini browser available around the world. As per every month in recent history, Opera has released their “State of the Mobile Web” report that analyzes what Opera Mini users are doing. The fact that every single web site you visit using Opera Mini has to go through one of their servers to be compressed offers an amazing amount of insight into user behavior.
During December 2009 there were a total of 46.3 million people using Opera Mini, and this is the first time in history that number is equal to the amount of people using the desktop version of Opera. That’s 11.0% more than November 2009 and 159% more than December 2008.
Opere Mini users viewed 20.7 billion pages in December, that’s a 10.1% increase compared to the previous month and a 223% increase since December 2008. That translates to over 300 terabytes of data consumed, a 10.5% increase compared to November and a 206% increase since the same month last year.
This “State of the Mobile Web” focuses on South East Asia and social networking. Click here to read all the details, but with regards to social networking in the United States, Opera Mini saw a 194% increase in users using Facebook during the course of 2009, 25% increase in users using MySpace, and a 21% drop in users using Twitter, which makes sense since most people would rather just use a native client to interface with Twitter, or even SMS.
We’re still waiting for Opera Mini 5 to go final, in the mean time read our review of the latest beta.
Update: An Opera Communications Manager just contacted me, there was an error tabulating the social networking numbers. Twitter users didn’t decrease by 21%, they increased by 689%. They’re correcting the data on the website right now.