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Mike Maskin has a note on The Feature about downloads of Opera's Symbian OS-based browser, now with download numbers over a million, and points out the silliness of comments from 3 UK's COO that "Anyone in their right mind who tries to do anything on the Internet with a screen that size has to be nuts."

We've all long known about the success Opera has had in carving out a unique, albeit small, space in what was once a crowded field of browsers. People can't be limited by rinky-dink WAP browsers stuck in a carrier's walled garden. The WAP experience is merely functional, at best. But for anyone who's craved access to information and been stranded with only a phone -- WAP can be handy, if the site you need supports it. Or then again, maybe I'm nuts to access the internet with a screen that size. Or maybe my nuts are the size of the internet screened. Something like that.

Reqwireless has been out there with their J2ME browser for some time, and seem to regularly place near the top of Handango's popular product listing -- at not a cheap price, I might add. There are aspects of their approach, or at least the results of their approach, that are strong, and yet -- even having written and discarded a few Java based web browsers, I'm feeling that itch again to build another one, to build my own browser. Maybe open source, maybe focused on performance and usability adaptations for mobile devices -- how can the browser affect page-to-page navigation so that it's easy to use?

Posted by juechi at September 22, 2004 05:33 PM