Opera releases Mini phone browser

Opera Software released Opera Mini last Wednesday introduced. This is a piece of Java 2 Mobile Edition software that runs on, the company claims, virtually all mobile phones. Currently, the Opera Mobile browser is present on 8.8 million of the 20 million smartphones sold in 2004. In order to increase market share in the market for ordinary mobile phones, which now totals 700 million units, this developed new software. Through this mini browser, access to the web is also possible for telephone users who previously could only visit WAP sites. For the time being, this service is only available in Norway, Opera’s home country, but it is expected that this service will also become available elsewhere later.

When a user requests a web page, it is pre-processed by the server software, for example, all kinds of superfluous code and large images are filtered out and compression is applied. This new page is then sent to the web browser on the mobile phone, which only has to do the relatively simple rendering work. Virtually all types of pages, including SSL sites and pages with extensive scripts, can be viewed through Opera Mini. This allows the Java client software to be kept relatively small since most of the work on the server has already been prepared. Opera Mini is 60KB in size, while the normal Opera browsers are 1 to 4MB in size. A GPRS connection is required.

The difference in handling web pages between Opera Mobile Browser and Opera Mini