Browser Firm Opera Talks HTML5, Successes, and Challenges

12.03.2012
Norwegian browser maker Opera took me out to dinner last night, and we talked about what the company has been up to. In a nutshell, Opera - the only browser maker located outside the US - says it's doing well.

The company says it has all but abandoned the strategy of getting phone makers to ship its browser on new phones. The company's focus today is on selling its browser in emerging markets and marketing its various browsers through wireless operators.

HTML5: Dream Big The big Opera news hit last month at Mobile World Congress when the company announced its new Opera 12 browser, which contains some cool HTML5 functionality. All the browser makers--Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), and Microsoft (Internet Explorer) --are working hard to bring new HTML5 functionality to both the desktop and mobile devices such as phones and tablets. For a look at how well mobile browser firms are doing supporting HTML take a look at this chart from the .

Now comes the hard part of integrating HTML5 into Opera and other browsers.

The hope is that once apps that run in the browser can do everything that free standing mobile apps (the kind you download and that run on your device) can do, the type of phone or OS you use won’t matter anymore--all apps will run on all phones. This could be huge for the app developer community, which would then focus on building one app that runs on everything. Right now, making different versions of apps for different OS’s and different flavors of OS’s is a huge resources sink.

The benefits would also be a boon for browser makers too, putting the browser – be it desktop or mobile – into the center of the action. Instead of download, installing, and launching apps users would spend far more time in the browser.