Battle of the Browsers coming to a cell phone soon

Rating: wowzer thats a browser?

by Rob Knight

Interesting article over on The Wall Street Journal on the development of the mobile browser. In an attempt to improve the mobile browsing experience browser developers have gone back to the drawing board, no longer relying on redesigned pages just built for a mobile device.  Phones just do not have enough processing power to display a standard web page and give a decent surfing experience akin to your desktop, so developers such as Opera have ripped up the rule book. 

The Opera Mini has had over 15 million downloads since its release in January 2006.  This solution developed by Opera Software ASA in Norway isn’t just a browser, it an E to E solution. The browser talks directly to Opera’s servers and its the servers that do all the hard work, resizing the images, caching the page, ripping out irrelevant content which all adds up to allow a faster experience, similar to sitting at your desktop.

All the major players have a light client/server solution in development.  Deep FIsh is Microsoft’s offering.  I beta tested this a couple of months ago on the Nokia N95 and it seemed a decent offering even though it didn’t have all the bells and whistles yet.  It will be intresting to see how the Open Source players respond, Nokia’s own browser is built on open source code so expect to see a battle to see who becomes the king of the mobile browser hot up in the coming months. I mean, why make your phone work harder that it has to? It’s only a phone right??

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4. Opera introduces browser for Android platform
5. Bytemobile and Opera Software to integrate Opera Mini and Bytemobile Unison