Opera upped its efforts in the mobile browser wars on Wednesday with the release of the next version of its Mini browser – Opera Mini 5. The new version comes with a sleek new look, and features such as speed dials and tabbed browsing.
The Norwegian browser company still enjoys the top spot in the mobile market, with 25 per cent market share according to Statcounter. This puts it still just ahead of iPhone’s Safari browser, with 22.3 per cent.
But the competition is tightening. Mozilla is working on its own mobile browser, Fennec, while Research In Motion recently bought Torch Mobile to improve its browsing capability. Microsoft is also understood to be improving its Internet Explorer Mobile browser.
Opera was an early entrant into the mobile browser market and has had a long time to grow a loyal user-base. Another strength is the fact that Opera Mini works on virtually every phone, even very simple ones. More than 30m people use it each month, partly because of its wide accessibility.
“Mid to low-tier browsers leave a lot to be desired, and Opera has a big opportunity serving this space,” said Geoff Blaber, analyst at CCS insight.
Opera is very good at inventing things. It is the world’s oldest browser company, having been founded in 1994, and its innovations have often been widely copied throughout the industry.
However, it does not have the slick marketing nous of Apple or the sheer industry weight of Microsoft. In the PC market, despite years of good work, it has found itself sidelined, with just 2.9 per cent share of the global market. The company has got to be hoping the same doesn’t happen in mobile.
