In this year’s GSM world congress, many hardware as well as software vendors displayed their products. Opera, makers of multi platform web browsers Also introduced up gradation of their browser from the 8.x series to new 9.5 series. The current announcement makes the already popular opera browser to come in line with their current desktop versions which are based on different core altogether. The current 8.x series browsers are not able to display flash content from the video streaming sites like youtube.com or metacafe.com and not able to take advantage of Ajax enabled websites like gmail.com, which give facility to users to chat through the mailbox itself. The new browser is set to be implemented on all the platforms like Symbian, windows mobile and desktop. The people at opera say that the browser will further converge the experience users have on desktop environment to the handheld environment with faster navigation and fast rendering. The browser is said to be almost 2.5x faster than the internet explorer mobile running in windows mobile. The current breed of browsers on windows and Symbian environment leave a lot to be deserved as they are tad too slow in rendering the content and the scrolling through the WebPages is not at all smooth. Its hyped that the new browser will be implemented using the opera’s Presto rendering engine which will make the rendering on handhelds as much close to desktop as possible with smooth transitions.
The User interface of the browser has been designed from scratch which seems quite similar to the safari web browser. The browser is further said to implement already popular opera mini’s panning mechanism to next step by introducing opera zoom which will automatically high light the links in zoomed area rather than simply zooming into the content. The new opera will introduce even more powerful tabbed browsing as in 8.x series the opening more than 2 tabs degraded the performance dramatically which won’t be the case now. Landscape mode will further allow device with big screens to browse content with ease. Now the opera will also allow you to save WebPages so that you can view them offline. The support for calling numbers when encountered inside the webpage is will also be extended. Password manager is also rumored to be beefed up.
There is further addition of Opera widgets, which are very popular with desktop version of the web browser. They have been implemented as a standalone application, which do not require you to open the web browser for using them.
The companies like Nokia, HTC, Motorola and Sony Ericsson these days include this browser in almost all of their smart phone devices and upgrading it to make it at par with the desktop browser will only help in increasing its popularity and push the current the mobile-surfing phobic users back to browsing. Although the browser is currently in its alpha testing, but the team at opera says that it will be available by spring this year. Many mobile OEM manufacturers are relying on opera’s new browser to counter the iPhone’s amazingly fast and slick safari web browser.