A small group of website and mobile app developers recently started off an “Occupy Flash” campaign in the hope of putting an end to Adobe’s popular browser plug-in.

The group, which launched a website earlier this week, said its goal was to “Get the world to uninstall the Flash Player plug-in from their desktop browsers.”

Flash Player is dead. Its time has passed. It’s buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates. It’s a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of Web technology. - The Occupy Flash site

No Occupy Flash members were identified, saying “We decided not to make this about us, but about Flash Player.” One representative stressed, however, that none of the handful of site and app developers behind the movement worked for an Adobe competitor.

The Web is an open place, and we’re for open standards and for what is in the best interest of our users.  HTML5 has already won the fight for the future of our Web browsing. - An Occupy Flash representative

The group, which is four or five strong, is composed of developers based on the West coast of the US. The occupyflash.org domain was registered on Nov. 11, two days after Adobe’s announcement of the demise of Flash on mobile platforms.

Will use its own creation instead.

Nokia, the largest handset manufacturer in the world, is known to use the Opera Mini web browser in some of its products. However, things are about to change as with the launch of four new Series 40 devices, Nokia has decided to use its own web browser instead.

Just like Opera Mini or Amazon Silk, it will use a proxy browsing technology, which can compress web sites by up to 90%, saving bandwidth costs for the consumer. However, those are not the only devices to feature Nokia’s new toy. Earlier this month, a Finnish company has announced C2-05 and the X2-05 cell phones with the exact same technology.

One might ask, how did they come up with such idea? Back in March, 2010, Nokia has acquired Novarra, Illinois based company that specializes in web browsers and this is exactly where the technology comes from.

While Opera Mini was the first and only web browser to have a web page compression feature for quite some time, there appears to be an underlying trend, which now threatens to eliminate one of the main selling points of the mobile Opera web browsers.

Via: Nokia Press

In order to end the continuous user confusion and strengthen its position in the Android market, Opera Software will ditch both Opera Mini and Opera Mobile web browsers in favor of a hybrid option, according to the company officials.

Up until now, users had to decide, go with the Opera Mini and let its servers handle web pages rendering or chose a traditional approach and install Opera Mobile, which transfers such tasks to the consumer device.

While both versions have their own strengths and weaknesses, a hybrid version (due in 2012) will automatically detect the network capabilities and switch into Mini or Mobile mode, when required.

While we welcome such approach, there is little to no point on releasing a hybrid web browser when all you have to do now is enable the “Turbo” option in Opera Mobile web browser and enjoy the very same functionality that is found in Opera Mini.

Source: cNET

[Thanks, Rafael Luik]

Opera Software, the Norwegian browser maker, has recently released an update for both Opera Mini and Opera Mobile web browsers.

According to the company report, Android only updates now include a “Data Usage” view, which (when Opera Turbo, a web page compression technology, is enabled) allows users to see their bandwidth savings.


Furthermore, you can now import system bookmarks and add them to the Home Screen, if required.

Having said that, both versions user can also expect overall performance and stability improvements as well as some minor fixes.

As usual, the latest version can be found in the official Android market here.

For a complete list of changes, visit the source page below:

[Via: Opera Mobile Blog and Opera Mini Blog]

The latest additions to Nokia’s phone portfolio, the C2-05 and the X2-05, come with a new browser that uses Nokia’s own compression technology to deliver content faster, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.

Opera has been promoting the benefits of using compression technology for years, but lately it has come into fashion. Recently, Amazon introduced Silk for its Fire tablet, and the browser uses compression as well as the computing power and caching of Amazon’s cloud to render pages in the Web.

The browser is part of Nokia’s strategy to expand the audience for mobile Internet access, going after the “next billion” users, many of whom are expected to be from developing countries. The browser uses a cloud based service to fetch a web page, and then transforms the content to an optimized version for display on the mobile device, according to Nokia.

There is a real focus on trying to enable data services from high tier smartphones to as low as you can go. We talk about smartphones all the time, but there are a lot of countries where smartphones are just a fraction of the market. – Pete Cunningham, analyst at Canalys

A couple of days ago, Mozilla has released its first nightly build of Firefox Mobile (Fennec) for Android tablets, which according to developers has reached a functional stage and is good enough for collecting the feedback.

With the continuous Android growth, Mozilla is betting big on the Google’s mobile platform to keep Firefox momentum going. As far as Windows Phone goes, it’s unlikely to receive attention from Mozilla anytime soon.

Download.

Apple’s Safari, the default browser on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, rules the usage share roost, representing 53% of the mobile browsing market.

Two trends are clear. Phones and tablets are stealing browsing share from desktops at an accelerated pace. - Vince Vizzaccaro, a vice president with metrics firm Net Applications

Users still do nearly all of the their browsing from a desktop or notebook computer, Net Applications’ numbers showed, but that’s changing: A year ago, desktop browsing controlled a 97.2% share, compared to 93.2% in August.

The other trend is Apple’s obvious advantage. In the last 12 months, Safari’s share has increased by 9.3 percentage points, and now owns a majority of the smartphone and tablet browsing market. The clear loser has been Opera Mini, which lost 12.5 points in the same period, reducing its share to 20.8%.

Apple’s iPhone and iPad account for the bulk of Safari’s share, although the former, which has a nearly three-year lead on the latter, remained slightly ahead last month. According to Net Applications, 27.4% of all mobile browsing was done from an iPhone, while 22.5% was conducted on an iPad.

Dear Opera,

Please bring Opera Mobile with Opera Turbo to Windows Phone 7. Seriously, the only reason why I (and probably few other people) haven’t switched to WP7 is because of the lack of web page compression in IE9.

Thank you.

Signed, current and potential WP7 users.

It appears as if Mozilla is planning on developing what is deemed a truly open source mobile operating system based on the web. An HTML5 based mobile OS, to be exact.

Boot to Gecko, the name of the project as announced by researcher Andreas Gal, will be done in the open and all code would be published as it is written.

As many of you know, Gecko is the rendering engine that powers Firefox. The aim of the project will be to get apps running without the need for the browser, effectively creating a web based OS. Some building blocks from Android are going to be utilized for booting and drivers, though ditching Google’s OS is an option if that’s what the Mozilla community feels is best.

Mozilla believes that the web can displace proprietary, single vendor stacks for application development. To make open web technologies a better basis for future applications on mobile and desktop alike, we need to keep pushing the envelope of the web to include – and in places exceed – the capabilities of the competing stacks in question. – Andreas Gal, researcher at Mozilla

The project is looking to the Mozilla community to take part in the development of Boot to Gecko and if you have an interest in this, check out the link below.

Booting to the Web

Good news for all handheld device users. Today, Opera Software has released a new version of Opera Mini and Opera Mobile web browsers.

So what’s new?

How about we let Opera talk for itself? Here is a feature list, straight from their announcement post.

- Search suggestions from Google and Yandex will appear when you start typing in the search field.
- You can now search directly from the address bar! The search option will appear in the drop down list when you type something.
- The text selection is greatly improved for touch screen devices. Just click on the text you want to select, then drag the handles to adjust the selection and press “Select”.
- Opera Turbo improvements for Opera Mobile. More speed!
- Improved picture quality for Opera Turbo using WebP.

Well, enough talk now, let’s just download it already.