Showing posts with label Opera Software. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Opera Software. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

New Internet browser from Opera

Norway's Opera Software released on Tuesday a new version of its browser, Opera 10, promising faster downloads, new design and new fea
tures.

Opera battles for the spot of third-largest browser maker with Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari, but is far behind Microsoft and Mozilla Foundation.

Opera said the new browser is significantly faster on resource-intensive pages such as Gmail and Facebook, and adds features like full thumbnails of all open tabs.

Opera said its Turbo feature for slow connections, which packages web pages, makes the browser up to eight times faster than rival browsers in low connection speeds.

"We have worked a lot on Opera Turbo technology and have also made major improvements on the overall product stability. This is the most stable Opera browser yet," the company said.

The companies usually release several successive test versions of their browsers so they can incorporate user feedback in a series of improvements before their final launch. Microsoft launched its latest IE8 browser in March after a year of public beta testing.

Opera unveiled a public test version of the browser on June 3. Microsoft's Internet Explorer is used for about 60 per cent of global Internet traffic, and Mozilla's Firefox has about 30 per cent, with usage of Opera, Google and Apple all around 3 per cent each, according to Web analytics firm StatCounter.

Opera has a small share of the global desktop browser market, but its browser is the most popular in countries like Russia or Ukraine, and its mobile browser is the most widely used browser on handsets.

Agencies

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Fewer American youth access Internet: Survey

Fewer young Americans have Internet access than their peers in the Czech Republic, Canada, Macao and Britain, a survey of 13 countries around the world showed.

Among 12 to 14 year olds, 100 percent of British youth use the Internet, followed by Israel at 98 percent, the Czech Republic and Macao and 96 percent and Canada at 95 percent, according to the World Internet report by the Center for the Digital Future.

By contrast, only 88 percent of Americans of the same age had access, trailed by Hungary and Singapore, where more than seven in 10 young people use the Internet.

Separately, a bulletin by a software company showed mobile phone access to the Internet burgeoning outside the United States, especially in Southeast Asia.

For the report by the Center for the Digital Future, headed by Jeff Cole at the University of Southern California, researchers in 13 countries talked to more than 25,000 people in Asia, Australia, North and South America and Europe in late 2007 and early 2008.

UNIVERSAL SERVICE LACKING
The Center report showed the United States trails other countries in older groups, too. U.S. Internet usage by those over 18 runs behind Sweden, New Zealand and Canada. Recently, U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin unsuccessfully proposed a universal service fund to promote high-speed Internet access, similar to the one for telephone service.

Martin also advocates new spectrum for wireless in the United States to facilitate Internet access and held a joint news conference with Larry Page, a founder of Google Inc, to promote the idea.

The Center report, issued annually in the United States and for the first time worldwide, said mobile phones are used for Internet access "by a very small percentage of users, with the exception of the United Kingdom."

But that may be out of date. A monthly bulletin issued by Norwegian software maker Opera Software shows mobile phone Internet access exploding.

Opera said that, during 2008, use of its Mini browser on mobile phones more than tripled, reaching 5 billion page views in October. The increase is especially marked in Southeast Asia and also showed spikes in Africa and the Middle East.

In Indonesia, user growth tripled. Page views there increased eight-fold and in the Philippines by 10-fold.

"In many of these Southeast Asian countries the mobile Web exists not because it complements existing means of access, but rather because it replaces them," Opera added.

Source: Reuters

Total Pageviews