![Screen shot 2009-10-22 at [ October 22 ] 8.51.40 PM](http://www.mobilecrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Screen-shot-2009-10-22-at-October-22-8.51.40-PM.png "Screen shot 2009-10-22 at [ October 22 ] 8.51.40 PM")
You hear that rumbling? That’s the sound of mobile internet usage exploding.
Sometime tomorrow, Opera will be releasing a couple of interesting usage statistics for what is one of the (if not the number one) most popular browsers in the world, Opera Mini. They were nice enough to fill us in on the details a bit early, and to give us a green light to share them with you tonight.
For those unfamiliar with the application, Opera Mini is a popular internet browser for mobile phones. Being that it’s written for J2ME, a very widespread Java platform, Opera Mini is compatible with a damn near absurd number of phones. Combining this compatibility with a rather impressive feature set and the fact that Opera Mini is completely free, the application has rocketed in popularity since launching in 2006.
Here are tomorrow’s stats:
- In September of 2008, the Opera Mini client was pushing around 150 million page views per day. In the past year, this number has jumped over over 233 percent, all the way up to 500 million page views per day.
- In September of ‘08, their active user count was hovering around 19 million active users; today, they’re at 32 million.
- One of Opera Mini’s driving features is compression; rather than pushing content directly to your handset, it first takes a trip through Opera Mini’s servers where extraneous data is stripped, and content is compressed down to a more mobile-friendly handset. The Opera Mini servers are currently compressing pages by up to 90%, with the average user pulling down just 6 MB of data per month to their handset. This works out to faster page loads — and for some people, less money spent. By Opera’s count, they’re saving users on pay-as-you-go data plans (who can pay up to $1 per MB) an average of $54 per month in data usage fees.
One thing that’s interesting to note here: the number of pages served is not proportional to the growth in active users. While the active user count has ticked up by around 68%, the number of pages served has rocketed upward by 233%; in other words, people are viewing significantly more pages on their handsets than ever before. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that mobile internet usage is growing rapidly, but it’s incredible to see by how much.
Opera Mini may be fast but it does not render pages as accurately as the Webkit based browsers found on Nokia N97 or the iPhone.
Opera Mini is still concerned about serving pages to devices w/o touchscreens and typically weaker CPU/mem than the iPhone & n97. There’s no point in competing with the iPhone browser because apple won’t allow other browsers.
To compare Opera Mini you have to look at no touchscreen mobile browsers.
Indeed.
OperaMini is more about serving web pages to low end smart phones though. I found it also makes huge different on the amount of data transferred over the network, as the webpages are rendered on the server side first. Great for those of us who do not have unmetred wireless Internet.
Uh, Opera Mini renders pages much more accurately than WebKit. Especially WebKit on Nokia phones.
Also, remember, there is no “WebKit”:
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/10/there_is_no_web.html
you all opera mini is not so good it dosen’t render pages
Doesn’t render pages? It renders pages fine here.
I also you opera mini on my Nokia and it’s one of the best around
Opera mini browser is fine for Nokia but need some improvment such as rendering the pages.
is not so good
Wow, how detailed you criticism is! Amazing.
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+1
Fuck off, spammer.
Opera Mini works fine on android powered htc hero. I used to use it on my non smartphones. I am still impressed by it.
The Opera Mini browser is really good, no doubt about it.
I think Opera has already surpassed IE and firefox in number of active users in India.
I wish and hope that opera mini dominates the mobile section
Opera Mini browser is very popular…I use it every day,and I think it is perfect…
I use it but they need to give away tabbed browsing in the free version.
If I’m to use McDonald’s free wifi in the UK on my SonyEricsson, one tab is required to be kept open, so tabbed browsing is a must. At the minute for this I use the Asian UCWeb and I’m not aware of another free non-smart phone web browswer offering tabs.
They have tabbed browsing in Opera Mini 5. You can get it here: http://www.opera.com/mini/next/
I wonder how many opera browsers came installed, verses blackberry browsers in use, verses safari/iphone, verses nokia, etc?
Your statements above have a lot of hyperbole and are kind of short on facts. If you would, do a numbers comparison? It would be very helpful in assessing whether Opera is one of the most popular mobile browsers.
Since it’s so difficult to install/use in the Blackberry, and those kind of blow away much of the market share, I doubt Opera is one of the biggest browers in use.
But I’d love to see a real assessment of browser usage in mobile, and within continents as well.
Thanks,
I think Opera uses “popular” in the sense that people choose to download Opera Mini. Almost every phone comes with a browser. Netfront has shipped more than 600 million Web browsers on phones, yet they fall to 6th place in the market share rankings.
BTW, Opera comes first in this ranking of mobile browsers: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-200910-200910-bar
Opera is one of the most popular browsers on BlackBerries. But the BlackBerry has a rather pathetic market share world-wide.
32 million active users?
That’s just about 50% more than Farmville that launched four months ago. And I’ll bet Farmville generates more than 500m views per day.
Just some perspective on scale.
The difference is that Farmville encourages users to spam their friends to unlock more crap they can build their farm with.
Opera Mini is something you consciously download, and not because a friend of yours wants you to register once and never use it again because he wants more crops to use in the game.
There are also other reasons why the comparison is completely crazy, such as the fact that Farmville will be accessed every time someone logs into Facebook.
I’m using Opera mini on an Android device and I’m quite disappointed about the way it is implemented. I think the Android version isn’t user friendly nor intuitive compared to the rest of the OS. It just doesn’t fit in…
That’s because it wasn’t designed for Android. Apparently something designed for Android is coming.
That’s 15 pages per user daily. Pretty decent. They are doing a good job. Have been a opera user since v4. ( desktop)
Compressing HTML is good for everyone. Maybe not the adveriaera thought