Opera Mini is a highly popular web browser. Many of you don’t use it because you have a top of the line smartphone and live in a country that has a relatively inexpensive to use high speed wireless network, but you don’t represent the true reality of mobile phone use. In many parts of the world people think a $100 feature phone is expensive, and EDGE networks are only now starting to roll out. How are those folks supposed to get their daily Facebook and Twitter fix? What Opera has done with Opera Mini is move the actual rendering of a website to a server in the cloud, then they compress said webpage by as much as 90% before finally spitting it back down to your handset. It’s so popular that they’ve got over 100 million people using their app.
Google, looking to make sure everyone has access to their services, has recently announced that they’ve optimized their Google News portal for Opera Mini users. They now support 29 languages and 70 editions of Google News, and they have also improved their thumbnail images and text snippets so you can get a better idea about a story before having to click through and find out what’s really going on in the world.
As the price point of smartphones gets pushed down thanks to both scale and Moore’s law, and as networks get faster because operators are quickly starting to realize that their voice revenues are shrinking thanks to people preferring to text or email each other, Opera Mini may not be as useful as it once was. Until that day comes though, our favorite Norwegian company is helping connect the unconnected, and with more people having access to the services we take for granted, the smaller our world becomes. Do we sound a little bit too optimistic about the future of the web? Yea, we love it.