Opera, Microsoft, and the Mobile Browser Market

DrEspenA writes "Salon has an interesting article on the competition for the mobile phone browser market. Ostensibly the article is about Microsoft's efforts to dominate the market, but the key protagonist is really Opera Software, which may be gaining the (initial) upper hand simply because they are not Microsoft. Good discussion of whether standards and familiarity really is necessary in the mobile browser market."

Re:why no choice?

[Skiboo]

Because there's only so many browsers you can fit into a mobile...

Re:Open Source?

[Mr Teddy Bear]

Got Lynx? [browser.org]

What about Links? [mff.cuni.cz]

Re:Do we really want this?

[oo7tushar]

well...if AvantGo (avantgo.com I believe) provided a service for cell phones then it would work quite nicely for a lot of news pages. It basically works the same way browsing for a Blackberry works.
You send a page that you want to a central server which parses and formats it. It then sends it back to your phone and boom...you get images, text, links and everything. I use it for my Handspring all the time and it downloads many of my favorite sites...of course I wish it could compact Slashdot further but I think Cmdr Taco may have to talk to the AvantGo people about it.

Small screen rendering

[Mr_Silver]

In Opera, engineers have solved the scrolling problem with something they call "small-screen rendering," in which HTML code is "massaged," von Tetzchner says, "so that it can fit on the screen." The results are intriguing; by examining the structure of the page, the browser produces a small-screen version that includes all the important content but requires only vertical scrolling.

Am I the only one that thought that this wasn't particulary unque? Hell, Lynx has been doing it with text for ages and AvantGo (with "display tables" turned off) does exactly the same thing.

Whilst the Opera guy may think that the browser war is hotting up (he's wrong, MS have won, everything else is relegated to the niche position and always will be - there are far too many Joe Blow users out there), they are definately onto a winner in the mobile arena.

Oh finally, for those that don't know, Sendo are not a well known manufacturer of mobile phones here in the UK. The reason being is that they don't sell under their own brand. Their business model is to create cheap network operator branded phones and for that, they do pretty well.

Re:Not just anti-Microsoft

[StefMeister]

Well, if you read the article you will see that they indeed say there are more reasons to choose Opera besides the "they're not MS"-argument. For example the fact that Symbian's OS for mobiles together with Opera is much more 'tweakable' and allows for more personalized software on the phones.

I guess they will (mainly) use the "Microsoft is an evil monopoly"-argument to convince the businness-guys and the other arguments for the tech guys.

Standards, uh?

[RAMMS+EIN]

``Good discussion of whether standards and familiarity really is necessary in the mobile browser market.''
What standards? Do you mean the de-facto standard for desktop computers (MicroSoft), or the vendor-independent web standards, which Opera has traditionally supported like no other?

---
``The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from; furthermore, if you do not like any of them, you can just wait for next year's model.''
-- Andrew S. Tannenbaum

There's already a leader

[Tsk]

on that market, and that leader is Openwave [openwave.com].

Their solution is already selling millions a month.

The real question is will people use smart phones to browse the web.

Re:Small screen rendering

[trezor]

• Am I the only one that thought that this wasn't particulary unque? Hell, Lynx has been doing it with text for ages and AvantGo (with "display tables" turned off) does exactly the same thing.

This is different. While Lynx just plainly ignores html-table-tags and replaces them with linebreaks, this Opera thingy is actually doing reformatting of the page, after a full analysis of the layout.

Even though I don't know how well this works, it seems like a extremely clever algoritm, and shouldn't be underestimated as simple table-dropping, which is actually a lack of standard features.

From the opera-quote:

• "massaged," von Tetzchner says, "so that it can fit on the screen."

This implies more than mere table-dropping to me at least, and especially if you read the press release (no I will nothunt it down for you).

As for Opera's "small screen rendering"

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla does it better [glazman.free.fr] - and using nothing more than a stylesheet. (Note, that entry describes how to do this with a bit of javascript, but a few days later he was able to do it with only css.)

Admittedly, for such purposes Mozilla's huge amount of features is a wee bit overkill, but Phoenix might just be lean enough, and otherwise it's still possible to only embed the gecko-engine, adding a very minimal front-end.

Re:Small screen rendering

[WhaDaYaKnow]

Hell, Lynx has been doing it with text for ages

You are joking, right?

Rendering HTML in text mode is one thing. Add CSS, Javascript, DOM etc and it's an whole nother story.

I'm not saying that all these technologies are so great, but a large amount of sites rely on it today. Being able to render a document that contains all that stuff properly is unique by itself. There are only a handful of browsers that can get close.

What Opera does is difficult because not only are they trying to support all these technologies, but they also have to deal with these other trivialities that Lynx can conveniently ignore, called graphics/images.

Re:Bad Reasoning...

[WhaDaYaKnow]

It won't be more than a year or two before those tiny devices can run at 480 by 640

About two years ago, my wife brought home the prototype of a PDA/cell phone thingy. (the day before Andy Grove had showed the exact device at a wireless conference; I still wonder how she got a hold of it :-O) I can't remember the name, but it was once covered here on /. I believe it may have been a Korean company. (that really narrows it down, I know...)

Anyways, this thing had a 640x480 display and the device itself wasn't really bigger than say an iPaq. The most amazing thing was that it _actually_ worked. The built in phone worked fine and browsing was actually quite acceptable. The only thing that didn't work was the bluetooth pen that was supposed to double as the earpiece.

Well, I was very impressed to see the device that I had always wanted and had dreamed of. So I played with it for at least 5 minutes, thought 'ok, it can be done', and went back to doing fun stuff.

Microsoft is actualy quite small

[Anonymous Coward]

Who has the largest market share when it comes to browsers for mobile phones? You probably don't know because you never see their brand. If you don't count all the Nokias out there the major player is AU-system [ausystem.com]. So if you're not using a Nokia and you don't have an expensive EPOC based phone you probably have the "AU Mobile Suite" in your phone. There are a few other suppliers, but Microsoft is actualy quite small. :-)

Re:Small screen rendering

[grayrest]

Actually, you can do the same thing in the gecko engine (or any other CSS compliant browser), it's just a stylesheet:

http://daniel.glazman.free.fr/weblog/archived/2002 _10_20_glazblogarc.html#83455700 [glazman.free.fr]

Re:Not just anti-Microsoft

[Nomad37]

That quote is actually from the article (last page) where it talks about the fact that most mobile manufacturers are impressed with Opera just because they're surviving against MS, and as another poster has pointed out, because of MS' licensing deals being ridiculously restrictive...

Small scren rendering on Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Get the Opera 7 Beta 1 from www.opera.com. It supports "small screen rendering", so you can test the experience (and your own site, web designers take note!). Somewhat quirky with frames right now, but a step in the right direction.

Now! In selected European countries

[CaptainZapp]

Don't be suprised if you find a Microsoft branded mobile phone released sometime in the next couple of years.

Too late. It's [orange.ch] on the market since about a week in selected European countries.

The phone is manufactured for Microsoft and sold exclusively through a deal with Orange.

If it is a success, now that's a whole different question. I guess people prefer not having to reboot their phones.

Java for Mobile Devices

[grungeman]

There is a really good Java HTML component called WebWindow (http://home.earthlink.net/~hheister/ [earthlink.net]). The designer focused on memory consuption, which makes it a great option for mobile devices. And since Microsoft seems to be losing ground at least on the mobile phone market, this could become another competitor.

Re:nice

[rseuhs]

Microsoft failed in the embedded market (except on PDAs where they are doing OK) because:

• WinCE is too expensive. In lower numbers (like several hundred per year), you pay about 100$ per unit (at least that's what I have been told). I have no idea how much you pay for mass-produced devices, probably a lot less. Still you want to standardize on an OS, so you will choose one that can be profitable on both mass-produced devices and niche devices. You won't choose WinCE. Also you usually have only a very vague idea how many units you will sell of a particular device. When your device becomes a smash-hit, you may be easily be paying the WinCE license fees, but if the numbers stay slow, WinCE can turn the numbers into the red, espcecially if you have to lower the price of the device.
• WinCE is only suitable for PDAs and not really that useful anywhere else. WinCE comes with an good graphics library, but most embedded devices don't need it. With non-graphic applications, WinCE just slows you down.
• Nobody trusts Microsoft that prices and contracts will stay stable.
• You don't get the source code. (Yes, the end-user doesn't care, but the embedded developer does.)
• WinCE doesn't offer anything valuable. Yes, I'll get flamed for saying that, but face it: The only thing Windows does better than other operating systems is running Win32 or WinCE-PDA applications. If you don't need that, why use Windows?
• Embedded developers are not used to be dependent on the OS. General purpose operating systems became popular only recently on embedded systems. Most embedded systems were developed with no or a specially designed OS inhouse. Moving from the inhouse-OS (with source-code available and no license fees) to WinCE could very well be considered a step backward. The same person might be happily paing for Windows on his PC but would not dream of switching to a non-free (as in having the source and as in beer) OS.

Yes, I do work in embedded systems. Microsoft has already lost that market. On PDAs, they are still holding out pretty well, but in the long term I see them losing that, too.

Microsoft has more has 300+ browser patents

[Balaitous]

Try http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2Fsearch-bool.ht ml&r=0&f=S&l=50&TERM1=Microsoft&FIELD1=ASNM&co1=AN D&TERM2=browser&FIELD2=&d=pall [uspto.gov]
So what they don't get by technology, they might try to force by litigation, particularly if software patents would be officialised in Europe.

misuse of the word 'standards'

[2ms]

When you are talking about standards in the context of browsers, u're usually talking about whether or not they comply with them and thus whether or not they encourage web developers to take advantage of "features" which are nonstandard. MS makes deliberately non-standards compliant browsers in order to seduce web developers and unknowing (Office and Frontpage) users into increasing the number of sites which dont work right in Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, etc. This is a disgusting manipulation and attempt to take over for one's own purposes something which was intended to be universal and available to all.

Therefore, implicitly equating "standards" with MS's "familiarity" while talking about browsers is dumb. If MS doesn't take over by convincing the phone companies that their phones need to be maximally familiar to windows users, then there is some hope that standards compliant browsers such as Opera will prosper in this sector.

Re:Open Source?

[timmyf2371]

I have yet to see the usefulness of internet on the run.

IMO, there are a few good uses of the Internet on the run. I commute, as do many people, by train to work. During the 15 minute ride I have a few options:
I can look out of the window at houses and offices
I can try and make eye contact with the various passengers near to me
or I can visit various news sites using my mobile device and pass the time by reading interesting stories.

There can be a use for mobile browsing, but I believe that the devices will need to get better, and connectivity options (GPRS/WiFi) will also need to get cheaper.

Tim

Re:Microsoft is actualy quite small

[f00zbll]

Yeah, and I know first hand why. Micro-IE or what ever they are calling it now was a huge heaping pile of dung. No I'm not pulling one out of my ass. I used to work at a small phone company and had long discussions with the embedded engineer who was responsible for integrating and testing IE on phones. The memory requirements back in 99 was around 600-700kb minimum if you stripped it down to the absolute bones. When you compare that to the other browsers available in 99 like WAP browsers 600kb was not acceptable. The most expensive parts of the phones are memory, lcd and battery. The newer reference boards for CDMA from Qualcomm have much more memory than the ones based on x86 back in 97-2000. When you consider phones used to use x86 chips, the whole memory issue becomes a huge headache. Now that most chipsets for phones are risc based, things like banking/swapping memory are no longer an issue, but memory still is one of the more expensive components of a phone. People are probably gonna say, "64meg dimm goes for xx.xx dollars." Well think about how much the popular phones cost? Most are under 60 bucks for entry level phones. Once you add up all the costs, you realize most manufacturers are either subsidizing the phone or only make 1-2% margin.

they don't get it

[captainspudly]

The Openwave (www.openwave.com) browser is already leading. It targets the small screen and limited input you will always have on a phone. Even if phone displays get better, phones will always have constraints that desktop browsers will never have. Openwave recognizes this.

Re:Mobile browsers?

[leeet]

Actually I would suggest a different approach: make websites decent.

Actually, I lived in Japan for a while, where cell phones users have been browsing for about 4-5 years now and *most* sites have a special "sub-site" for cell phone users. So instead of going to www.yahoo.com, you'd go to www.yahoo.com/imode and get less (if none) graphics.

Basically, you don't want (and shouldn't expect) to use a full graphic, java+flash based website...! Here is a good iMode example [fujii.org]

Re:Not just anti-Microsoft

[Skiboo]

As someone who's done a fair bit of browsing on a system with 32MB of ram, (this doesn't leave much once windows takes a bite), I can assume that the reason Opera is using that much ram is because you have tons of ram free.

Kinda makes sense, if you have ram, you might as well use it as a cache of pre-rendered pages (or whatever else they use ram for.) Notice how easy it is to press the back button 30 times in IE, then do it in Opera.