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Opera Software Brings Its Browser to Mobile Phones 207
13Echo writes "Now this is cool! Opera Software has presented a technology today that solves the problems of web pages on small screens. They have created a small-screen HTML rendering technique that slightly reformats web pages to fit within the bounds of small displays. Some screenshots can be found here along with extra details as to how they do it. A full press release can be found here. As a result, horizontal scrollbars are not needed, and it even features zooming abilities for magnifying web pages."
More info.... (Score:5, Informative)
And without the mistakes (Score:2, Funny)
"Visually impaired users can zoom out on a page to achieve legible font sizes for reading."
Zoom out to get legible fonts? Yeah.
Re:Isn't this already on the Zaurus? (Score:3, Informative)
That's additionally painful because the screen updates aren't nearly instantaneous and more importantly, you can't scroll to the end of the line with a single button press. Stupidly, the hardware cursor keys do the equivalent of arrow keys, rather than PageUp/PageDown & Home/End. So to read the last two words of each line of a web page, you've got to scroll 4 right (redrawing each time), then scroll 4 back to start the next sentence. (Then probably scroll 2 down to advance through the document). Ten fairly slow redraws where one should've sufficed.
Its so irritating that I'd often tend to just ignore/guess the last word of each line, rather than crawl over to read it. If the website is nice enough to offer a "printable" or "pda" mode, then that'll generally work, by enabling line breaks based on your viewing width. Slashdot has the "&lite=1" option, for instance- too bad it doesn't stick when you link from the main page to an article!!
Because of those problems, I've often preferred to run lynx when browsing with a Zaurus. It ignores most of the page elements that lead to unflexible formatting. (Oddly, "links", a more advanced text-based browser, supports things like tables and frames, and thus becomes unusable on small screens the same as a pixelized program would)
Opera on the Zaurus will also view PDF files, and the problem is even worse there. All the same obstacles are there, PLUS the document authors probably used a dual column layout, PLUS redrawing after a scroll takes 10 seconds instead of 0.5. PDF is evil! The press release didn't mention it, but I hope they can apply some auto-reformating to PDF files as well.
My other hope, as always, is that they won't try to patent this technique. The Opera developers aren't in the US, so maybe they're not so infected by IP-fever...
MS beat them to it (Score:1, Informative)
Uh, nothing new there. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Uh, nothing new there. (Score:4, Insightful)
I tried it on WAP. I know it was stupid
The error on a highly non compliant site I just typed was "Sorry, site isn't W3C compliant".
Webmasters ignoring W3C, that stuff is coming to you. Sooner or later. Code standards compliant pages and you will save from lot of headache later.
Also WAP is going great way. All standards compliant. E.g. nothing refuses you because you are a Ericsson customer other than Nokia. Mobile stuff is free from non standards... Oh wait! Hotmail.
BTW, commercial company (especially resellers) webmasters, you will block Opera from accessing to your site? I can understand all the dotcom troubles now, ignore a $2000 phone customer wanting to buy something from you... Yea,right.
Re:MS beat them to it (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but Opera beat IE here. Not only was Pocket IE a crippled version of Desktop IE (is Pocket IE 6 still as crippled? Haven't checked lately), while Opera's handheld offerings have always had the same rendering capabilities as on desktop. This is why Opera seems to be the browser of choice nowadays: You get everything, not just a renderer which has been crippled because it is normally too bloated. Opera is small, you know.
And now comes small screen rendering, where Opera basically gives you the ability to view any web page on your mobile device by doing some clever reformatting.
How exactly did "Microsoft beat Opera to the punch"?
Illegal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Illegal? (Score:4, Insightful)
If your reasoning was true, it would lead to not being able to write a little poem on the book you offer to your mother, for instance...
Re:Illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)
HTML is just text and markup - there is no appearance until it's rendered in a user agent, and one of the basic rules of the web used to be that the rendering was 100% up to the user agent: ALT-attribute if you cannot render images and all that.
To complain that some content is transformed before display on a device is like complaining that you lose the colors if you use a B&W photo copier with a colored book.
Re:Illegal? (Score:2)
Re:Illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)
By its nature, how HTML is rendered is up to the browser. An HTML document doesn't have a set "appearance". Or are you saying that opening a website in a text-only browser is some kind of copyright violation?
I don't think ad-filtering proxies have ever been found to be illegal, anyway.
Re:Illegal? (Score:2)
Drag the edge of your browser so that it's very very small. Watch as text and images probably just got moved all over the place. Once it's on your "machine" you can do with it what you please.
Re:Illegal? (Score:3, Insightful)
so no it's not illegal, no matter what the lawyer turds say...
Re:Illegal? (Score:2)
Mobile phones and the web. (Score:1)
Re:Mobile phones and the web. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nokia is the king. Nokia chose Opera for mobile. MS Pocket IE is a joke now.
Symbian is the king of PDA, they chose Opera.
Opera is the current king of non PocketPC (WinCE) PDA/Phone environment. BTW, no reason that Opera won't be implemented on Windows CE too... Its a totally respected company too.
Geeks, you don't have to hate Opera just to be c00l (the poster I replied, its not directed to you).
Tired... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you need to get on the 'net that badly, you need a life.
IMHO, It's much more useful to use your mobile phone as an interface between your computer and the 'net. I do, and it works beautifully without any problems due to limited space. If it's a pain in the ass to set up your laptop to do this, then you really don't need to get on the 'net. Can't you wait the 15 minutes until you get home?
Porn doesn't look good on a 1X2" screen.
Have to agree with you (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Tired... (Score:3, Insightful)
What if it's not 15 minutes until you get home, because you didn't have the train-schedule handy? What if a plane crashes into a building and you have no close by news source? What if you are plain and simply bored and want some fresh entertainment?
Re:Tired... (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, if I'm near the building where the plane crashed, I kinda already know what's going on, what do I need CNN.com to tell me about it? Not to mention that a flaming cascade of debris is going to command my attention a hell of a lot more than getting the news from a web site. Dunno about you, but I'd be running away too fast to browse or even care about the news.
And if I'm nowhere near that building, thank god, and I can wait to get home to see horrendous suffering replayed over and over and over and over again on my big TV screen instead of wondering how much that guy is really bleeding on my small PDA/phone screen.
Re:Tired... (Score:2)
See. Browser phones are useful. Don't second guess my article submissions!
Re:Tired... (Score:5, Funny)
Soooo...your equipment is too small then?
Re:Tired... (Score:2)
Re:Tired... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're out in the middle of nowhere on a road that's not even on the map what do you do?
a)Wander around aimlessly in hopes of making it back to the main roads?
b)Call someone who knows the area better than you do?
c)Download a better map from the web?
d)Profit!?
I'd love to have a web enabled phone thingy. It's much less clunky than a laptop, and it will soon be affordable to everyone. Most people nowadays fail to realize the potential of the web, seeing it as some sort of frivolous entertainment thing that you could do well without. The web is an extension of your limited memory. With omnipresent web access and well developed google skills you effectively know *everything*, it's just not on your brain yet. Computers (and the web), as foretold by Vannevar Bush, are increasingly becoming an indispensable expansion of your brain. Learn how to live with it, and you'll have a great advantage over those who don't.
Re:Tired... (Score:2)
I will own my first cell phone in a few weeks. I have to have it. It will be off 100% of the time I am sure.
I travel quite a bit. I have NEVER had the need to use a phone.
Re:Tired... (Score:2)
Pinko. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Tired... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have similar feelings and a simple solution for us both:
Don't buy one!
Just because you don't like the idea doesn't mean technology should stop right then and there. Sheesh.
Re:Tired... (Score:2)
I'm tired of the "jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none" hardware that's coming out these days. I personally find no need to have a web browser built into my phone (or for that matter, I have no use for a phone that CAN have a web browser built in).
If you need to get on the 'net that badly, you need a life.
Why have a radio in your car? Can't you wait until you get home to listen to the news/ballgame/music? What about mobil phones in general. 10 years ago, anyone with a mobil phone was just being excessive. Now children have them. Not that we NEED any of these things, but they are useful. They do make our lives more convenient.There are other uses for the web than PR0N (Score:4, Interesting)
And no, I do not carry a laptop with me all the time. Did you just say someone else what in the need of a life?
I do carry a cell-phone though, and WAP might have been the solution, had it worked. My phone has WAP support, but I have yet to make it do anything remotely useful.
Re:Tired... (Score:2)
Can't you wait the 15 minutes until you get home? You've never travelled further than fifteen minutes from home?
You've never travelled anywhere without a laptop? If you travel everywhere with your cell phone, laptop, and cables hanging all over the place... I don't believe you should be lecturing people about not having lives.
Opera lags the state of the art, as usual (Score:5, Funny)
Come on, lynx has been doing this for years!
Re:Opera lags the state of the art, as usual (Score:2, Informative)
There's no doubt about it: Opera is doing something new here. This will give them the edge for a while. And it's not the first time Opera have shown innovation when it comes to browsing. Mouse gestures, anyone?
this is great, but.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:this is great, but.. (Score:2)
ok, next... (Score:5, Insightful)
The next thing we need is phones with slightly bigger screens.
Small is beautiful, but I like it practical as well.
Look at the first mobile phones (GSM style). They were thicker. That is not good. But they were broader than the current models without that ever being a problem.
Why not go back to the slightly larger models and put a bigger screen in them?
Good work now ...... (Score:5, Insightful)
mmmmmm forced useability.
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thank god allmighty for tities and beer [wallpaperscoverings.com]
Re:Good work now ...... (Score:1)
This exists (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This exists (Score:1)
Re:This exists (Score:2)
Re:Good work now ...... (Score:5, Informative)
It's a drop down box on the right side of the address bar. Download Opera at Opera.com and check it out!
It's a neat feature.. useful when pages use an 8 point font and the text is hard to read or when you follow the "Awful Link of the Day" over at somethingawful and have to scale down the 48 point yellow font on an orange background..
Re:Good work now ...... (Score:2)
Re:Good work now ...... (Score:2)
On the other hand, it is the job of the web browser to deal with the dumb things that web sites do, since the browser actually knows how big the window is, and such. What would be really nice would be if the W3C actually got around to having tags for things that sites use tables inappropriately for, so that web designers could actually give good information to browsers. As it is, there's no way to specify things like sidebars, rather than specifying the details of layout for them. If you look at a newspaper or magazine article, you'll notice that all of the high-level layout features (drop quotes, sidebars, separated initial paragraphs, tool-bar-like things, etc) are missing from HTML, and can only be done by specifying not what they are, but where they go.
Re:Good work now ...... (Score:2)
I'm not clear why you think that you can get a sidebar by "floating a div". First, that's specifying presentation, not semantics. Second, I couldn't find a site that does that: the New York Times uses a table, CNN uses a table. In fact, the W3C uses a table on their front page [w3c.org]. If the W3C uses a table on their front page, even though they say [w3.org]:
probably there is no way to do it using HTML correctly.
Drool? (Score:4, Informative)
The only website I'd like to view on my phone is the yellow pages.
Re:Drool? (Score:2)
The only website I'd like to view on my phone is the yellow pages.
I agree. There's nothing else I could need while I'm away from my laptop and DSL.
Well, maybe movie listings. That's all, though.
And maps. Maps are good sometimes. With directions.
And flight schedules. And flight status. Trains, too.
That's all anyone could need, I think.
Restaurant databases might be handy. With ratings, reviews and notes. Linked to maps.
That's all I'd want on my phone.
News headlines could be good. And stock quotes. Tickers even. The ability to make trades might be nice. Oops, I forgot, my portfolio consists of two dying hampsters. Never mind the stock stuff.
Slashdot might be good for those hardcore addicts. Not me, of course. Not me. I don't have a problem, you see. I can quit any time I want. Really, I can. I think.
Anyway, I'm sure there's absolutely nothing else that would be useful on a mobile phone. No browser required, clearly.
lynx has been doing this for AGES (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:lynx has been doing this for AGES (Score:2)
Re:lynx has been doing this for AGES (Score:2)
There's more to it that ignoring tables and images (which is basically what Lynx does). Remember that there are also images, colors etc. that need to be dealt with. If you read the article (I know this is Slashdot, but come on!), you will notice that Opera even tries to be "smart" when choosing what to display. It can even be set to block ads (which take up too much space on screen).
Also note.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, let's see Mozilla.org do the same please
Yeah, this really does put Mozilla to shame. (Score:1)
Well... (Score:1)
scrolling (Score:3, Insightful)
Not for me yet (Score:4, Insightful)
High WAP charges, already slow download speeds (9.6k IIRC), and the Nokia featured in the story is by far the largest display on a mobile currently available here (most others are considerably smaller though PDAs will benefit), mean this wont be useful for me in the near future.
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that bong ba ba ba bong [wallpaperscoverings.com]
Re:Not for me yet (Score:2)
Re:Not for me yet (Score:2)
I've been using GPRS (w/ Telstra) and while not as fast as I'd like, its way faster than using plain ol dialup over GSM.
I don't wanna be downloading images any time with the current pricing for data, downloading even a quick street map for directions would cost you as much as calling the taxi and the resultant fare (well, not really, but it'd be expensive).
How do Opera do it? (Score:5, Interesting)
In Opera 6, you can zoom pages from 20 to 1000%, switch to a custom stylesheet with one click, use mouse gestures, browse in tabs (long before Mozilla did it), highlight a piece of text and do a dozen different kinds of search on it with a single right-click...
What did IE 6 add? Cookie management. And, uh ...
Opera runs on a dozen OSs, IE has to target Windows environments only.
Are Microsoft complacent, or is IE 7 going to incorporate some of these useful new features and maybe even innovate a little?
Re:How do Opera do it? (Score:3, Funny)
Completely correct. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Completely correct. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How do Opera do it? (Score:2)
Re:How do Opera do it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Call me mad but I bet they will somehow trick people to get a passport user.
Just like in XP, not forced but tricked.
So, support Opera too. They didn't do anything bad, just they are a small company (still!) and they earn their food money from coding. So, its not GPL. Easy as is.
Re:How do Opera do it? (Score:2)
As far as IE falling behind. I had a nice flight yesterday and in an ironic move, my wife had slipped "The Road Ahead V 1.0 in my backpack, and it was the only thing I had to read. (For those that remember V1.0 was the version where Bill Gates stressed that the internet was just a "passing fad" and not worth Microsoft's time and effort.)
Re:How do Opera do it? (Score:2)
Re:How do Opera do it? (Score:2)
The point of IE was not to build a better browser, it was to destroy Netscape. After that had been (apparently) achieved, I think most of the team were pulled in order to work on stuff like .NET
Don't expect IE to move forwards now - why should they? Opera is not competition to IE, neither is Mozilla. Although they are both better, IE is there on the desktop, and Moz/Opera are not.
I've given up hope of Mozilla beating IE on Windows. It will take over the world, but it'll be on the back of Linux, there just isn't enough incentive to switch browsers.
Re:How do Opera do it? (Score:2)
In the short-term, you're right. But I think there is hope for alternative browsers to increase their share. If Opera becomes ubiquitous on mobiles, it'll get a certain brand-name recognition and people might try it on the desktop. Also, I think OEMs and people like AOL might start bundling Netscape 6 or the free version of Opera.
When people realise that other free browsers are becoming radically better (and less risky security-wise) than IE, I think enough of them will switch to end the IE monopoly.
No, Opera won't work with Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
Half the time, when I click on a link on the main page to get to a story, Opera/Slashdot forgets who I am and I become Anonymous Coward. Especially irritating when I want to reply or moderate! Logging in again doesn't help: the login is accepted but ignored.
I asked Opera but they don't know what is going on, and there doesn't seem to be any way of contacting
I hope
That is simply not true. (Score:2)
Opera 6 supports both old style MDI and new-style tabbed mode where you can have multiple windows. Opera refers to Tabs as "Pages" so you have a "Page bar".
I've even created a screenshot [tig.com.au] for you as this is an oft-repeated piece of misinformation.
I find the tabs in Opera 6 much more usable than their Mozilla counterparts. Improvements include:
Already been done (Score:4, Informative)
Reqwireless WebViewer [reqwireless.com] already solved these same problems almost a year ago, and with the added bonus that it works on many more mobile phones than what Opera appears to be targeting.
Opera still seems limited to Symbian OS phones like the Sony Ericsson P800 and Nokia 7650, which Reqwireless WebViewer supports. Additionally, Reqwireless WebViewer works on phones such as the Motorola i85s, i95cl, Accompli 008, T720, V60i, Samsung SPH-A500, and RIM BlackBerry 5810.
(Disclaimer: I work for Reqwireless and wrote most of WebViewer. I'm kind of annoyed that Opera is acting as though they've done something new.)
Re:Already been done (Score:2, Funny)
It's a fancy new technique called Marketing.
But that doesn't make it any less annoying.
Re:Already been done (Score:2)
Re:Already been done (Score:2)
That's hard to say with their Sony Ericsson P800 and Nokia 7650 versions as they're not released yet. I suspect that Opera will be considerably slower than Reqwireless WebViewer since Opera does everything client-side whereas WebViewer uses a transformation server to scale the images and reduce the data traffic required.
Right, but I was thinking of mobile phones, where J2ME is much more common than Symbian OS. The same Reqwireless WebViewer that works great on the Nokia 7650 also works fine on the Motorola V60i--a small, black and white phone with a 96x54 screen.
For PDA's, Bitstream did that & did it better. (Score:2, Informative)
It's been available publicly for 6 months, and was fairly widespread in beta for the same period of time before its official release.
Granted, it only runs on Pocket PC right now, but that's because the proprietary font which makes the small text so readable requires a sufficiently sharp display. They're beta testing a version to run on the Clie now, and other clients are coming as well.
I posted to
Hope it will force better web design (Score:5, Insightful)
If enough people start surfing the net from small devices, web logs will show that and the web designers will have to listen.
Other than that, this is the way to go. We don't need yet one more document format for small devices. Better use HTML/XHTML and adapt the rendering to the device you are using ...
Promissing (Score:2)
Anyway, it will allow me to read
Internet browser on a SIM card (Score:2, Interesting)
My danger phone does that (Score:2, Interesting)
Bad idea... (Score:3, Insightful)
Designer nazisism strikes again! (Score:3, Insightful)
This attitude is starting to piss me off!
J.
Re:Designer nazisism strikes again! (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't help but feel that if more energy had been devoted to making designers more aware of how WWW differs from designing for paper, the web would have looked a lot better than it does today. not to mention that it would probably have depended less on outdated, kludgy techniques for forcing a particular look given a very narrow list of target user agents.
whenever I read comments from people who abhor the idea of content being adaptable to a wider range of user agents, I can't help but feel that these people have missed the entire point and are very much part of the problem.
perhaps what one should ask is how these people can be educated? how do you explain the basic idea of creating content that can be accessed on a wide range of user agents in a manner where the content can benefit from the feature richness of some UAs while still being usable on UAs that are more constrained?
to me the biggest problems seem to be that a) people are too lazy to care, b) too incompetent to understand why this is a good idea and c) too occupied defending their suboptimal use of technology to sit down and have a good, hard think.
besides, the rocks and sticks approach to "web design" doesn't exactly do wonders for things like getting browser developers to maximize the subset of CSS that actually works across products. the list of CSS-features that are broken in various browsers, and thus shouldn't really be used, is too long.
Re:Bad idea... (Score:2, Insightful)
Any halfwit with a few books on "contemporary typographical tastes" and some HTML-editing software can do "web design" these days and get away with it.
The problem is that good web design is a lot more than getting a visually pleasing result on a very, very narrow set of configurations.
Explaining "designers" that web pages have very little in common with paper is harder than explaining the concept of screw/screwdriver to a chimp that has just understood how to drive in nails with a hammer.
If you are still concerned with the exact look of your web pages on various browsers you are in the wrong business. What's worse: you don't even know it yet. You should be more concerned with giving your users the option of deciding how something should look.
And no, I am not talking about dynamic content generation where the user can vary how the HTML is mangled.
Re:Bad idea... (Score:2)
Nokia 7650 users don't need to wait for Opera (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Nokia 7650 users don't need to wait for Opera (Score:2, Informative)
Espial Escape has been doing this for ages (Score:2, Informative)
Uh, hello Slashdot?!
Espial Escape [java-browser.com] has had these features for years!
Escape is a state of the art, pure-Java browser that dynamically fits HTML4 content onto mobile phones & TV screens. Check it out!
Can you zoom in from higher resolution rendering? (Score:2, Interesting)
I had an old 486 DX/2 50 laptop I used for ages with Opera. It was great on the old machine, no slow down at all. But, it was 640x480. I would frequently have to look at pages 50% of their normal size to see everything at once (like big headers). Once I found what I was looking for, I would zoom in like 200% so I could read the article text. I imagine this feature would be even more useful on a cell phone, especially one running at at HALF the resolution I had on that laptop.
The examples the article gives makes it seem like Opera is a super efficient automatic AvantGo. I want to be able to look at the real think on my PDA or phone using PDA technology.
It's better on ANY display (Score:2, Insightful)
TA
Plucker - the GPL option (Score:2, Informative)
Visit the Plucker web site [plkr.org].
Tony
Ad blocker? (Score:2, Interesting)
It would probably be a bad thing though. Opera aleady has enough problems displaying pages properly (I still love it, though), I don't think they'll want to have a bunch of pissed off webmasters intentionally using non-compatible design.
A quick reminder: (Score:4, Funny)
Phone going off at the Opera: Bad.
Thanks for your attention.
They say WAP is crap. They're wrong. (Score:3, Interesting)
People don't realize why WAP was developed in the first place and why WAP is here to stay... WAP is a wireless protocol providing reliable transport over a wireless medium. Something TCP/IP can't do over the airwaves, sorry. Wap 2.0 supports WML which is optimized for small screens. It does exactly what this does.. but better. C'mon, rolling tables into 1 dimension is a hack. WML accomplishes this much better with decks. If you're familiar with WML you'd know this.
In the future WAP 2.0 will support XHTML.. and HTML is merging into XHTML. Then, and only then, can we have one markup on websites and display it properly for all situations on both wireless devices and wireline devices.
So, don't be surprised if carriers are using WAP for a long, long time despite all the FUD and bullshit.
Oh great, no horizontal scrolling! (Score:2)
Great! (Score:3, Funny)
I can see it now.. people spasmatically jerking their cell phones around trying to get gesture notation to work.
Opera Icon for Slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)
media="handheld" (Score:2)
I hope it also recognizes the CSS media="handheld" attribute.
Re:media="handheld" (Score:2)
If the page have a correct doctype and a @media handheld stylesheet, you should use it IMHO. Of course, you could make it an option too.
Mako (Score:2)
Jaysyn
Re:Mobile phones -- Worth the hazards? (Score:2)
If you just want it for emergencies, why not just carry it around powered off, only turning it on to makes calls? I can't imagine you'd be significantly endangered (assuming the dangers you speak of) by a minute or two of exposure on the rare occasions you need to use it (especially if it is a real emergency).