Better Mobile Web Browsing

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Where Opera Software diverges from Nokia is the company's Opera Mini, software that can be downloaded to a phone and will compress the size of Web pages, including media-rich ones. It routes a requested Web page to a server that pre-processes the page before it arrives at the phone. Eskil Sivertsen, public relations officer at Opera, says this pre-processing can shrink a 400-kilobyte website, such as CNN.com, to 10 percent of its original size. Since many phone plans include per-data charges, these smaller files can save consumers money.

Although better mobile browsing is obviously an improvement, some wonder whether trying to recreate the computer surfing experience on a mobile device is like print publications trying to replicate the reading experience on a screen.

Browsers that render Web pages as if they were on desktops don't necessarily take into consideration the types of functions people expect in mobile browsing, says Ronan Cremin, style guides director for dotMobi, an Internet domain that provides guidelines for creating websites for mobile devices. "When you're on the phone, it's an entirely different case than when you're sitting in front of a monitor," he says. "You're not just there to fiddle around; you want a bus time or a ticket price. It's a targeted experience."

That fact has Opera Software's engineers hedging their bets -- working on widgets, or mini-programs, that access the Internet for specific tasks, such as checking the weather, finding the cheapest gas, or purchasing movie tickets. Because people don't casually surf the Internet on cell or smart phones, mobile mini-programs for specific tasks make sense, says Opera Software's Sivertsen.

At present, there are about 300 million computers with Internet access, and many experts believe that market is close to saturation. But cell phones and mobile devices continue to proliferate throughout the world, especially in places like India and China. And better mobile browsers that make the Web easier to view on a tiny screen are helping drive the growth of that phenomenon.