On Wednesday morning, the Norwegian software firm brought out a new version of the browser’s low-end iteration, Opera Mini 4.5. This is intended for basic Java-capable phones – those with beefier phones that still fall short of “smartphone” status can download a more functional version, Opera Mini 7.5.

One of the standout features of Mini 4.5 is a new privacy mode – bear in mind that it’s little over a year since Google brought Chrome to Android, incognito mode and all. In keeping with the intended markets, Opera is pitching this as ideal for sharing your phone with friends who can then check their Facebook without any logins or data being saved.

The browser now features a download manager that allows the user to pause, resume and manage downloads (this was previously available on Opera Mini 7.1, but not on the basic version). It has also been given a general refresh, both visually and in terms of footprint (it is now lighter), and boasts new touch enhancements such as kinetic scrolling for touch-capable phones.

As Opera Mini product manager Christian Uribe noted in a statement, we’re seeing features gradually trickle down from the recently overhauled smartphone version of Opera down to the lightest-weight version.

“Having an excellent download manager is just as important for the students downloading class work to their phones as it is for business people with more advanced phones,” Uribe said.

Add to this the fact that (as with all Opera browsers) Mini 4.5 users get to use data compression technology that can cut costs by up to 90 percent, and it becomes clear that the low end of the mobile business is nowhere near as dumb as it used to be. Which is just as well — for many of the intended users, these basic phones are effectively their personal computers.

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Now it’s time for Windows and OS X users. Again, this is a beta we’re talking about (although Opera calls it a “Next version”), but it does show off what is to be expected in the full release of Opera 15.

Those features should mostly be familiar from the Android version, but here’s a quick run-down anyway:

• Speed Dial – For those unfamiliar with Opera, this pretty much refers to bookmarks. And, like bookmarks, they can now be organized into folders. Speed Dial also seems to give Opera a chance to earn some cash from partners such as Twitter and Facebook — this feature puts those services front-and-center.
• Discover — This feature is a bit like Google Currents, in that it brings up articles according to the user’s tastes.
• Stash — This one’s new: a read-later facility designed to reduce the need to keep tons of tabs open at once. Just click on the heart button to “stash” a page.
• Search — You can now search from the address bar in Opera, same as in Chrome and co.

The look of the browser has also been refreshed to make it more platform-appropriate and, of course, there are big changes under the hood. Opera 15 uses the Chromium engine and its “Off-Road” data-squeezing mode – previously known as Turbo – now supports Google’s SPDY protocol.

The only other major thing to bear in mind for existing Opera desktop users is that the new version doesn’t have an integrated mail service. The M2 mail application has now been hived off into a standalone version, the first release candidate for which can be downloaded here.

In a blog post on the new features, Opera web evangelist Bruce Lawson said the decision to split off M2 was made to reduce the footprint of the main program, and also because “not all current Opera customers use M2″.

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One interesting thing about this partnership is that Samsung has its own Smart TV platform, which it has been promoting aggressively to app developers. So why get a third party to power your devices? One likely answer: Samsung’s platform has been evolving from an all-purpose app platform towards a more TV-centric approach for high-end TV sets.

At CES in January, Samsung unveiled a new UI for its 2013 Smart TVs that comes with voice control, a live TV guide and a remote control with an integrated touch pad. The company is offering owners of select 2012 TVs to upgrade to the new experience for $300 with the help of its Smart TV evolution kit; but that kind of premium pricing doesn’t really work for a $130 Blu-ray player.

In light of that disparity, Samsung has to make a choice: Either fork its Smart TV platform to work on both high-end and low-end devices, or use a different solution for lower-priced devices. It looks like the company may be ready to go for the latter — and Opera seems to be the company to benefit.

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Opera has been active in TV for some time. The company’s browser software-development kit has been powering TVs and connected devices from Panasonic, Toshiba, Sharp and Philips as well as the new Boxee TV, just to name a few. Frode Hernes, VP of products and connected devices at Opera told me during a phone conversation last week that consumers already use an estimated 30 to 50 million TVs and connected devices that are powered by Opera.

But Opera’s role on your TV may get a lot bigger soon. Last year, it launched the Opera TV Store, a HTML-based app store that is now shipping with Sony’s Bravia TVs and coming to other vendors soon. And Hernes told me that it plans to launch advertising for TV apps before the end of the year.

These ads will include offers to try and install certain apps within other apps, much in the same way advertising is working on mobile phones. “We have done the technical integration,” Hernes told me, but the inventory just isn’t there yet. “It’s a little bit early,” he said. “We hope to have significant income next year” from TV ads, he added.

The company has also been adding additional features to its app store, including the capability to display apps side-by-side next to live TV and other content, and it is getting ready to switch its rendering engine from Opera’s own browser engine to Chromium to keep up with the latest in HTML5 development.

However, some of these changes might not find their way onto TV sets until 2014, simply because consumer electronics manufacturers take their time with integrating new software. “This is not like the mobile market,” Hernes said.

Consumers have often been on the flip side of those long release cycles, getting products that are already outdated as soon as they’re getting on the shelves of retailers, often with no chances for any product updates.

However, this could change once ads add additional monetization opportunities to smart TVs: Instead of operating on razor-thin margins and simply moving from one generation to the next, companies could actually be incentivized to add features and services to existing devices already in consumer’s homes, Hernes predicted. “This is one way of keeping the device relevant after it is sold,” he said.

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For a start, the URL and search bars are now one, much as is the case in Chrome. The startup screen has also been significantly overhauled, adding a curated content discovery feature that is slightly reminiscent of Google Currents, and a history page that is easier to access than before. Private browsing is now an option, as it is in rival mobile browsers these days.

On top of that, the Opera team has decided to tweak the Speed Dial concept: Speed Dial links are a narrow selection of favorite pages that show up on new tabs, and now Opera treats them like the bookmarks they are by allowing the user to organize them in folders.

Beyond these changes, the browser still includes the features that already make Opera popular with a subset of users, such as optional server-side compression to cut down on data usage and speed up page loads, and the ability to save pages for offline reading,

This was a much-needed overhaul. Opera’s problem has always been that it looked very different – that was because the company tried to do things differently, and they did succeed in introducing new concepts that others picked up on (Speed Dial was one and, at the risk of enraging Firefox fans, tabbed browsing was arguably another). This iteration has a very native-Android look, though not so much as to appear like a me-too browser. Features such as the combined URL/search bar may be unoriginal, but they were worth copying.

The start screen, meanwhile, is in my opinion now leaps ahead of the competition, being more intuitive, more feature-rich and perhaps even more attractive than that offered by Chrome. Bearing in mind that this is the first of the new Opera browsers to come out – expect revamps across the board – it’s a good omen of things to come.

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From a consumer app perspective, the two companies have remarkable similarities. Opera’s browsers are best known for using server-side compression as a way of saving on data costs, and Skyfire uses server-side rendering for video, making it a go-to browser for those who really miss Flash on today’s platforms. This deal is doubtlessly about uniting those two strengths, but that’s not its main thrust.

This is really about mobile carriers: about offering them more control over the quality of their services, and about giving them ways to monetize their subscribers’ mobile web usage. And it may just be a push whose time has come. The key there is the carriers’ current shift to software-defined networking (SDN), which in itself is intended to give operators the ability to fine-tune parts of their networks in ways that were not previously possible.

As it happens, Skyfire offers operators a video optimization technology called Rocket, that is supposed to free up capacity – as much as 60 percent, the company claims — at cell sites that are currently feeling the strain of the mobile video explosion. Skyfire also has a toolbar called Horizon that carriers can preinstall on their phones in order to offer customers context-relevant coupons, for example. Mountain View-based Skyfire has three deals with U.S. carriers for the Rocket Optimizer and Horizon (Verizon was a big investor), and is apparently trialling them with ten other operators around the world.

Opera, meanwhile, has its Turbo compression technology, but it also has a mobile advertising platform called Mediaworks and a carrier service called Web Pass, which allows them to offer pay-per-use mobile web access through the browser. Across these two companies, there’s a lot to play with –- in terms of both technology and geographical reach (Skyfire is strong in North America and Opera in the developing world).

As Opera CEO Lars Boilesen put it in a statement:

“Both companies have evolved far beyond their browser roots. Skyfire adds capabilities to our portfolio around video, app optimization, smartphones and tablets, and strength in North America. With video expected to consume over two-thirds of global mobile bandwidth by 2015, and as time spent on Android and iOS apps explodes, we are excited to extend Opera’s solutions for operators.”

In the same statement, Skyfire CEO Jeffrey Glueck (who will hang onto that title while also becoming Opera’s Operator Business Unit EVP) said:

“Opera practically invented cloud compression to improve mobile user experience, and the team at Skyfire is proud to join forces and advance cloud solutions together. Opera’s over 100 carrier relationships, global sales team, and delivery organization can accelerate the global commercialization of Skyfire’s technology. Opera’s Mediaworks advertising unit with AdMarvel, Mobile Theory and 4th Screen Advertising will strengthen Skyfire Horizon by offering mobile operators a complete turnkey solution including ad optimization, ad sales, and rich analytics. The synergies across all the product lines for both companies are tremendous.”

Glueck also wrote a separate blog post that’s worth a read. In it, he expresses excitement about pushing Skyfire’s technology into the developing world, and also gives a nod to the rise of SDN:

“This is a major milestone for our Skyfire family and validation of our vision for cloud computing and network function virtualization (NFV) to solve huge problems on mobile networks, from handling the explosion of video over cell towers, to finding ways for mobile operators to regain relevance and monetize in an over-the-top world. Back in 2007, when Nitin Bhandari and Erik Swenson started Skyfire, the idea that Tier One mobile network operators would entrust the cloud for core network roles was considered bleeding edge. Now it’s a topic everyone is talking about, and Skyfire is making NVF combined with Software Defined Networking a reality.”

So what’s next for the merged companies? For a start, they will out new products for carriers over the next year that build on Web Pass with new ways of offering mobile web access, such as “toll-free data” and “ad-supported data”.

And by the way, if you love your Flash video and you’re worried about the future of the Skyfire browser, don’t be – Skyfire will continue to develop and support it.

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Opera had already let slip the shift to WebKit when a company video “leaked” last month depicting a new, WebKit-based Opera browser codenamed Ice that’s going to hit iOS at some point, but the move to the Chromium framework — at the expense of Opera’s own, certainly on the desktop — comes as more of a surprise. Opera is also dropping its own Carakan JavaScript engine in favor of Google’s V8.

I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I think it unlikely that Opera founder Jon von Tetzchner would have let all this happen if he still held enough shares to exert influence on the company’s direction.

“300 million marks the first lap, but the race goes on,” CEO Lars Boilesen said in a statement. “On the final stretch up to 300 million users, we have experienced the fastest acceleration in user growth we have ever seen. Now, we are shifting into the next gear to claim a bigger piece of the pie in the smartphone market.”

Compatibility

In order to claim that bigger piece, WebKit is a smart move, Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie told me on Wednesday morning. After all, that same rendering engine is what underpins Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome, and given the dominance of iOS and Android in the mobile market, it’s become a primary concern for web developers. Said Wium Lie:

“People are using WebKit prefixes for CSS properties and it’s been troublesome for other browsers to render those pages without supporting the WebKit prefixes. That has been part of the shift we’re seeing and it’s also been part of our decision making. What we see as very positive is that we will be able to take some of our best engineers and have them work on common code that many people will use — we will reach more people this way.”

Opera’s statement said WebKit and Chromium would gradually be used in “most of” the company’s upcoming smartphone and PC browser iterations. However, Wium Lie suggested that “our whole product line will be affected in due course by this”.

Those who want to see some competition maintained in the mobile browser rendering engine space had better keep their fingers crossed that Windows Phone gains more traction (Internet Explorer uses Trident) and that Mozilla’s Firefox OS (Gecko) sells like hotcakes too.

According to an Opera developer blog post, the shift to Chromium will mean future versions of Opera have built-in support for the WebM, Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis media codecs, but will lack native support for the H.264 and MP3 media codecs. To support the move to the new framework, Opera will also provide a conversion tool for add-on developers.

“The WebKit project now has the kind of standards support that we could only dream of when our work began,” the post read. “Instead of tying up resources duplicating what’s already implemented in WebKit, we can focus on innovation to make a better browser. Opera innovations such as tabbed browsing, Speed Dial and data-saving compression that speeds up page-load, have been widely copied and improved the web for all.”

What’s Opera for now?

Chromium, WebKit and Opera have met before, of course, notably last year when Russian web giant Yandex released a browser that combined Chromium with WebKit and Opera’s Turbo engine, which uses server-side compression to cut down on the amount of data the user needs to download, saving them money in the process.

Wium Lie denied that Opera would be paring down its model to that of a mere feature provider, but hinted that there was some precedent in what Yandex did. He also stressed that Turbo and the “impressive infrastructure” that enables it were integral to Opera’s future:

“We will be using Chromium, but you can do a whole lot of stuff on top of that. Yandex released a browser that does some interesting things and adds features, and changes the UI, and it’s different from the Chromium browser itself. We worked with Yandex on that and we will be doing similar things with our own stuff. The rendering engine is an important part of the browser — it’s not everything.”

Opera’s new Android browser will get a showing at Mobile World Congress later this month (we will be there, naturally), where the company will also be touting its operator-targeting, pay-per-use Opera Web Pass technology. As for Ice and the other outcomes of the shift to WebKit and Chromium, we’ll have to wait a bit longer to see what the new Opera looks like.

UPDATE: In this piece I originally paraphrased Wium Lie to state that moving to WebKit was a “necessity”. He disputed that as a summary of his stance, so it has been changed accordingly.

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A rare opportunity to show this old picture of Jon von Tetzchner, scanned from Opera promotional material circa 2008

Even if Facebook did want to purchase Opera, von Tetzchner could have blocked the sale. He was by that point no longer the CEO, or for that matter even involved in the day-to-day business, but he did have just over 10 percent of its shares.

No longer. As reported by the Norwegian press on Tuesday, von Tetzchner has recently been reducing his stake in the company he founded, and now has only 5.18 percent of the shares. A spokesman for Opera confirmed this to me this afternoon.

This means that, if a buyer were to come along now, Opera could theoretically sell out. Obviously the spokesman wouldn’t comment on any speculation there.

Why would someone buy Opera? Well, the company may never have gotten past the low single digits in desktop browser market share, but it continues to do very well in the mobile space. This is largely because Opera offers big savings on data costs — its browsers can use server-side compression, so that the user uses fewer bits as they surf the web.

And with the big growth in mobile now happening in emerging markets, particularly those in Africa and south-east Asia, this stuff counts. People there want to upgrade from featurephones to smartphones, but data is still frequently expensive relative to earnings.

It would be somewhat premature to theorize who might want to pick Opera up at this point, but I’d be very surprised if no-one was interested.

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Android phones represented 31 percent of the more than 500 million mobile ad impressions tracked by Opera between October and December across more than 12,000 mobile websites and apps. iPhones, meanwhile, had a 29 percent share of those impressions. Major reasons for Android taking the lead include: the popularity of Android devices in markets where users are more likely to access the internet on a mobile device – like Indonesia and Russian Federation countries, which saw double-digit gains in ad impressions during the quarter — and Samsung’s rapidly growing popularity among smartphone buyers in the U.S.

“In the U.S. we think that this is considerably helped by the emergence of Samsung and the Galaxy S III,” Mahi De Silva, EVP of Opera’s consumer mobile division, said in an interview. “They’re pouring a lot of dollars into the market, and they have favorable pricing with mobile operators, so that entire market has a lot of momentum [toward] adoption of Samsung Android devices.”

Earlier this week we reported that Apple just barely outsold Samsung in the U.S. mobile phone sales during the fourth quarter, but Samsung sold nearly 7 million more devices during all of 2012, according to Strategy Analytics.

Source: Opera Media Works

iPhones are just one piece of the pie, however. When counting iOS’s overall impact, including mobile ads seen on iPod touches and iPads, Opera found that Apple’s devices still represent the largest overall number of impressions, about 42 percent.

And where it really counts — producing revenue for mobile advertisers — iOS is still comfortably in the lead.

“Even though you saw that for the first time Android phones have a larger volume of impressions, the dollars associated is still considerably in favor of Apple and iOS and iPhones,” De Silva said.

iPhones are responsible for 37 percent of the revenue made by mobile advertisers, versus about 30 percent from Android; and just over half of all revenues in the quarter came from some type of iOS device. So in terms of the ability to monetize, De Silva says iOS is still the more attractive platform for advertisers.

Android has a ways to go to catch up in revenue. And even though the platform is only going to grow and add more users, it’s not clear the monetization will catch up nearly as fast, he said. “The trend, as we’ve seen in the past, is iPhone continues to be the most monetization-friendly platform out there.”

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That was then, this is now. But it turns out the popularity of Opera Mini is still growing like mad – in fact, last December saw the biggest month-on-month growth for the tiny browser in its history, up 6.3 percent from 195.5 million to 207.8 million users. The Mini servers handled more than 143 billion pages and compressed more than 12 petabytes of data during the month. What gives?

The answer is a bit of a mixed bag. Firstly, the big growth in mobile internet usage these days is in emerging markets, and data can be much more costly – relative to earnings – in such markets than in the ‘developed’ world. This is why other players are also adopting compression techniques, such as Blaast and, somewhat controversially, Nokia.

As Norway’s Opera says in its latest State of the Mobile Web report, issued on Thursday, the earliest adopters of Opera Mini were in Europe and the U.S., with Asia hot on their heels. Adoption in Latin America took off back in 2011, and Africa in particular saw growth at the end of last year. Bear in mind that we’re now talking those areas where internet-capable feature phones and low-end smartphones are becoming people’s first computers.

Interestingly, Opera says 32 percent of its users are now on smartphones – that takes into account the 21.5 million users of Opera Mobile, which is designed specifically for smartphones, but as Opera Mini users outnumber Opera Mobile users roughly 10:1 that percentage spells big-time adoption of the lightweight browser on smartphones, too.

But there is another reason why December was so hot for Opera Mini, and that’s good old seasonality. As Pål Unanue-Zahl, the man behind Opera report, told me: “December is generally a strong month for the sale of mobile phones and a lot of users are discovering the internet on their newly acquired smartphones.”

Either way, Opera Mini is still doing really well, and its popularity should serve as a barometer for anyone designing apps for the emerging markets. Remember, not everyone has the option of being a data hound, and lightweight still rules for many.

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