Opera Software has just released their latest “State of the Mobile Web” report and with it comes the announcement that they’ve finally broken 80 million users. Opera, for those not in the loop, is a software company based out of Norway. They’ve been making browsers for close to 15 years now and while the IntoMobile team lives in either Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, it’s their mobile browsers that are getting the most attention these days. Opera Mini, the more popular of the two mobile browsers made by Opera, uses server side compression technology so that when you type in a URL your request goes to a remote server, then said server downloads the website and squeezes it down by about 90% before spitting it back out to your phone. If you’re in a country where mobile data is expensive or you have a handset that’s a few years old, then just stop reading this article and go to m.opera.com on your device right now and install Mini. It’s that good. The other browser Opera makes is Opera Mobile, and that’s meant to be used either as a replacement to or in addition of the browser that’s already bundled with your smartphone. If you’ve got a Symbian^3 device (N8, C7, C6-01) then you’ll want to stop using the built in browser immediately and grab Opera Mobile.
But enough about that, what’s in the latest report? Here are the key facts and figures:
- In November 2010, Opera Mini had over 80.0 million users, a 4.9% increase from October 2010. Since November 2009, the number of unique users has increased 91.8%.
- Opera Mini users viewed over 44.6 billion pages in November 2010. Since October, page views have gone up 7.3%. Since November 2009, page views have increased 137.3%.
- In November 2010, Opera Mini users generated over 645 TB of data for operators worldwide. Since October, the data consumed went up by 10.0%. Since November 2009, data traffic is up 137.6%.
- In November 2010 the two most popular websites visited by Opera Mini users were Google and Facebook. In November 2009 it was Facebook and Google. Interesting to see them swapping places.
- The iPhone, which wasn’t even on the top 30 list of handsets using Opera Mini during November 2009, was the 5th most popular handset using the service in November 2010.
[Photo above of Opera’s CEO, Jon S. von Tetzchner]