Opera mobile strategy: really in love with open mobile standards?

Opera is the global leader when it comes to mobile browsing. Its two mobile properties, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, accounted for 25% of mobile internet browsing even before Opera Mini was approved for iPhone (see our full report). Opera has long supported open standards for mobile and web development – but while the company came out strongly in support of HTML5 earlier this month, yesterday Co-Founder Jon von Tetzchner told the Open Mobile Summit that Flash was the only proprietary standard it supported on the web. Luckily for GoMo News, we had the chance to interview Mr. von Tetzchner himself about Opera’s opinions on open standards for mobile.

What’s the stance of Opera when it comes to Flash vs HTML5?

You can already do pretty much whatever you like with web-based standards – some people just choose to do it with Flash. We have no issue with Flash, and we very much like Adobe as a company. We’re not on a crusade against Flash, but we are on a crusade FOR the web. If you look at the kinds of applications, widgets and programmes that you are capable of making for a mobile web browser,  I really don’t see what kind of things you can’t make on web standards. You can create a highly visual game in a web browser that will work on a mobile phone, and that;s the most complex thing you can try.

You’ve recently released Opera for Linux – does that mean Opera is considering going open source?

Opera is not open – but we have supported Linux for many years. We support most open platforms in the world. We try to make all of our programmes accessible everywhere, but not open. We see ourselves as providing ubiquitous access to the most open platform in the world: the Internet.

There’s clearly a push towards closed platforms, unfortunately. Because of the financial success of the Apple and Microsoft closed platforms,  you’re seeing other platforms springing up and trying to get developers on their side. But Opera sees the web as a big unifier, and most companies agree that the closed system “detour” should end as soon as possible.

The important thing is to get the web everywhere – we’re seeing nice continuous growth there. Developers across the world now have to start considering the mobile web as a significant part of what they have to deal with in the future.

Opera trails terms of web browser market share, but it dominates the mobile market. Does it hope to capitalise on that and move more heavily into mobile?

If you look at the size of the market, about 25% of the world population is online and most of them are using PCs. But 4.5 billion people are using mobile phones – this is the potential market. Trying to get them all online is a big goal for us. This is a market that is bigger than PC in actual units. We are the number one browser on mobile, and on devices in general. We see a lot of opportunity for growth across the board. But mobile is in its infancy, and we don’t believe in throwing all of our efforts into it. Opera is working towards bringing the Internet evertwhere, regardless of the platform you’re on.

The Mozilla Foundation has a very active developer community, mostly thanks to the open source nature of Firefox. How does Opera handle its developers?

We are working on making our own application available as widely as possible. We enable app writers to create apps for our browsers. Importantly, anything on the web works on our mobile browsers as well, outside of a few limitation. But mostly everything will run. We also have people writing widgets and actual applications – in many ways this is just writing a web page. It can be as advanced as you like. You shouldn’t necessarily notice the difference between a web app and a native app, because you’re not coding on Opera in particular. Because we support open web standards, you’re coding for open web standards. The same code would potentially run on Opera and on the Mozilla browser.

Grandstanding Apple over the Opera Mini app was a pretty ballsy move (see our report here). Were you confident at that point that Opera Mini would be approved for iPhone?

We were confident. We hadn’t talk to Apple at that stage, so we had no way of knowing. But we had read their SDK license, and knew what we were doing. We had no reason to think that our application would be blocked.