Opera Software has added wireless social networking features with the latest version of its Opera Mini browser for mobile phones.
Opera Mini 3.0, introduced Tuesday by the
The social networking features make it easier for users to exchange photos and receive the latest updates from each other’s blogs.
Companies are increasingly combining social networks with mobile phones, as Oxy Systems did earlier this week with its music-oriented social network phling! for cell phones (see Streaming Music from PC to Phone).
The social networking champ MySpace has deals with Helio for a mobile extension of MySpace, and the social network has been expanding to
Opera, whose web-based browser has been around for 12 years, has also been expanding more into the mobile phone space, where it has been attracting users as an alternative to the mobile web browsers that come bundled with phones. The company has traditionally filled a niche in the browser field where it has competed with larger companies like AOL’s Netscape, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple Computer on the web. On mobile phones, it has faced off with Nokia, Motorola, Openwave, Google, NetFront, Bitstream, and other companies. The company sees an opportunity in the kind of personalization that users associate with their cell phones by adding a distinctive browser as well. “Mobiles are close to your body and are personal items,” said Christien Krogh, vice president of engineering at Opera Software. “Social communities, social groups, and user-contributed content are really taking off.” With the Opera Mini browser, users can take photos with a camera phone and quickly upload them via My Opera, post them on a photo-sharing site like Yahoo’s Flickr, or put them on their blogs. Opera Mini supports more than 500 different phone models, which the company estimates makes it usable on 500 million to 700 million phones. To install the browser, users go to Opera.mini.com, register, and the site will send an SMS (short message service) text message to their phone number. The user clicks on the SMS and can then install the upgrade, which takes up about 100 kilobytes of memory. Billions Served Mr. Krogh said Opera Mini has attracted more than 8 million unique users since the company introduced the browser in January (see Opera Adds Free Cell Browser). So far, the service has served approximately 2.5 billion web pages and the company expects it to reach 3.3 to 3.5 billion pages by the end of the year. The new RSS reader lets users read the latest information from their friends’ online diaries or from the news provided by newspaper and magazine publishers’ web sites and RSS feeds. The enhanced security feature provides a protocol for encrypting data, and according to Mr. Krogh, it makes the transmission both faster and more secure. Opera has also improved the usability features in the browser, compressing the long lists of links on web pages into plus signs that users can click on to expand or reduce them.
Mozilla put the second major version of its Firefox web browser into general release Tuesday after a long period of testing, only a week after Microsoft shipped its long-awaited seventh version of Internet Explorer. While Firefox 2 is not likely to achieve the market dominance of IE 7, the browser does include some significant enhancements that may help it gain market share in its battle against IE, as well as competition with other rivals like Opera and Apple Computer’s Safari browser (see Firefox Killer? IE 7 Unleashed). Those new features include a new user interface, including glowing toolbar buttons, built-in phishing protection, enhanced search capabilities, and improvements in tabbed browsing and spell checking. Mozilla developed the browser out of the remnants of Netscape Navigator after AOL offered Netscape as open-source software for a community of developers to improve. “From our perspective Mozilla is not a traditional software company,” said Christopher Beard, Mozilla’s vice president of products. “It’s all about making the web better for everybody and making sure the web is a shared public resource.” He said that Mozilla’s community of developers had built on their experience with tabbed browsing and added new capabilities around search, customizability, and usability. Mozilla has added more of the extensions it introduced with Firefox 1.1 and 1.5 and made them more user-friendly. The new search features let users type in an integrated search box when using Google, Yahoo, or Answers.com. The browser improves security by having access to a list of phishing sites and avoiding them. Better Tabbing Mozilla has also improved the tabbed browsing in Firefox 2 by opening links in new tabs instead of new windows and giving each tab a “close tab” button. Users can also scroll among the different open tabs via arrows on the left- and right-hand sides. A session-restore feature automatically restores a user’s windows, tabs, the text typed-into forms, and any in-progress downloads in case the browser crashes, or if the user is installing an application upgrade or extension. Users can now preview and subscribe to web feeds, either by subscribing to them via a web service or a stand-alone RSS (really simple syndication) reader, or adding them as live bookmarks. A built-in spell checker quickly checks the spelling of text entered into web forms without users having to resort to an outside application. Users can create a bookmark with a “live title” that automatically updates with the latest information. Firefox also improves on its add-on manager with a better user interface for handling extensions and themes. In addition, the browser now supports JavaScript 1.7 as well as search engine plug-ins written in Sherlock and OpenSearch formats.
A Jupiter Research analyst said Friday a company survey shows more and more business are turning to Firefox as their browser of choice and that trend may be hastened by Microsoft’s release of Internet Explorer 7.
Joe Wilcox said 44 percent of businesses with 250 employees or more allow workers to download Mozilla Corp.’s open-source browser at the office. Last year, only 26 percent of such businesses were willing to do the same.
”That’s a huge jump,” said Wilcox. “It’s an enormous embrace of Firefox in a very short period of time.”
The increase is probably because of employee demand for Firefox, which can be deployed without disruption to other desktop applications, Wilcox said. It appears workers have found the browser’s features, which include the popular tabbed browsing, more useful than the older Internet Explorer 6 from Microsoft Corp.
Microsoft has remedied that difference with the release out of beta this week of Internet Explorer 7. But few businesses are expected to use the browser upgrade until they install Vista, Microsoft’s major Windows upgrade that’s set for release to businesses in November.
The reason for the delay is IE’s tight integration with the operating system. Installing IE 7 on a Windows XP machine in an office would require a lot of testing first to determine the impact on business applications. Rather than test twice, companies are more likely to stick with IE6 until Vista, Wilcox said.
For many businesses, the move to Vista could take a year and a half or more, analysts say.
As a result, many people who get IE 7 at home through Microsoft’s automatic update service will likely find IE6 lacking. Without the option of installing IE 7 at work, they are likely to turn to Firefox, Wilcox said.
”If you can’t have one, then you’ll use the other,” the analyst said.
While Firefox is expected to get an up tick in business use, the browser is not expected to overtake IE, which dominates the corporate market. Numbers from Web metrics firms vary, but in October IE had from 82 percent to 86 percent of the market, while Firefox had 11.5 percent to 12.5 percent.
The Portland software project includes a set of common interfaces for KDE and GNOME. The goal is to make it easier for programmers and software companies to support both user interfaces.
Portland is overseen by the Open Source Development Labs and the Freedesktop.org effort to consolidate Linux and Unix desktop software projects. The groups announced the software release Wednesday.
Linux loyalties and programming efforts have long been divided between the two projects. Although software designed for one interface can run on the other, users first must have supporting components for both installed, and software companies can’t necessarily assume computers have both.
“Linux is the only operating system that doesn’t have a unified user interface,” said 451 Group analyst Raven Zachary.
“It’s not a major problem in most cases, as distributions (Linux software collections supplied by organizations such as Red Hat) solve the problem either by selecting one or offering both options,” he said, but added that it’s confusing to consumers and resources are being spent supporting two interfaces.
KDE uses a library of components such as buttons and pull-down menus called Qt, and GNOME’s equivalent is called GTK+. The Linux version of Adobe’s Reader software to view PDF (Portable Document Format) files requires the installation of GNOME’s GTK+ interface components.
Portland has won some early support. Qt 4.2, released last week, incorporates Portland 1.0, according to Trolltech, the Norwegian company that develops Qt. In addition, Linux versions Red Flag and Xandros have committed to include it in their next releases, OSDL said.
The software can be downloaded from Portland Web site.
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