opera

Opera announced today the opening of its own mobile app store.

The new online Opera Mobile store is offering both paid and free apps designed for a variety of phones, including those running Java, Symbian, BlackBerry, Android, and Microsoft's Windows Mobile OS. The company launched the new store with help from mobile app marketplace Appia, which provided the storefront e-commerce technology.

Opera is specifically looking to reach users of its own mobile browser by setting up the store's mobile Web site as a Speed Dial link. Opening the site on a mobile device prompts users to either select … Read more

The debate between using Adobe Flash or HTML5 for online videos could be winding down, but the war among different video formats is heating up.

A whopping 63 percent of all videos on the Web are now HTML5-compatible, compared to only 10 percent just a year ago, according to video-sharing site Mefeedia. Instead of relying solely on Flash to display their videos, many more Web sites are adopting video formats that can run directly in HTML5-compatible browsers.

The majority of the sites uncovered by Mefeedia are using H.264, the most common video format since it's also compatible for … Read more

Hardware acceleration has become the holy grail of browser development in the past year, as the technology to increase browser performance by tapping graphics cards to help with Web site rendering has advanced from the theoretical to the practical. Despite Opera being a longtime developer and advocate of hardware acceleration standards, and the first major browser maker to demonstrate hardware acceleration in use, no publicly released version of Opera included the technology--until today.

Opera 11.50 (direct download) is a rough alpha, unstable, not for daily use, and limited to Windows computers, but it does have hardware acceleration. This means … Read more

Opera Software and London-based phone maker Inq Mobile have penned a deal to preload Opera Mini 5 browser on several Android smartphones, as well as feature phones.

The U.K. will be the first to receive the models this month, followed by Australia and other European, Asian, and North American markets (Canada) in which Inq Mobile operates.

Opera Mini is known for speedily compressing and rendering Web pages through its proxy servers, an asset for feature phones in particular. In addition, the browser features tabs, bookmark sync, and a password manager.

Nokia and Microsoft want to create a "third ecosystem" to rival the mobile phone realms built by Apple and Google--but carriers have an even broader alternative of their own.

Last year at the Mobile World Congress show, a group of them unveiled the Wholesale Applications Community. It's an effort to outflank native software and monolithic app stores with Web apps not tied as tightly to specific smartphones and available through a variety of conduits.

And this year at the show, they launched WAC.

"With the commercial launch of operator storefronts, handsets and applications, all based on … Read more

Sony is partnering with Opera to enable Web browsing for the Japanese company's Bravia TVs and Blu-ray players.

According to the official press release, users can expect a full surfing experience, apps, and widget support based on emerging standards such as HTML5 advocated by Apple.

There's strangely no mention of Adobe Flash support, which is still widely utilized for Web-based mini games and videos.

Other new players providing built-in Internet browsers for their home A/V products are Samsung and LG, while Philips has been one of the pioneers, leading the trend since last year. … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Browser-maker Opera Software is taking advantage of the tablet rage at CES this year to demo a preview build of the Opera browser for tablets and Netbook PCs.

We got a look at it last night on an Android-powered Galaxy Tab and on a Windows 7-powered IdeaPad tablet. We even took a video, but unfortunately, one important feature--Flash--wasn't implemented on the demo units we saw.

What we did see has potential. Opera for tablets has the usual URL and Google search bars, and tabbed browsing. It also has the typical features of search, bookmarking, and history, to name … Read more

Today Opera Software announced that it's laying the groundwork to get its widgets platform onto its Android browsers. In lieu of extensions as employed by Mozilla Firefox, Opera uses widgets, small applications that run within the browser to perform tasks like showing the weather or a calculator.

From the development perspective, Opera's release of a widget runtime lets developers start creating these widgets for Android phones. It's alpha software, so consumers shouldn't start looking for these widgets yet.

Opera's widget runtime for Android uses a mobile application specification put forth by the WAC (Wholesale Applications … Read more

Driven by Google and like-minded software makers, a new era is dawning in which your software is constantly refreshed--often without any intervention on your part at all.

Depending on how you see things, that could be either a scary loss of control over your own computer or a boon to convenience and security. Either way, the practice is increasingly common.

I, for one, welcome it.

In the last week or so, I've manually updated Google's Chrome, Chrome Canary, and Picasa; Adobe Systems' Flash Player, Photoshop, Premiere, and AIR; Microsoft Windows 7 and Office 2008 for the Mac; Apple … Read more