1.5 Billion Open-Internet Browsers In Use By 2013: Report

ABI Research has issued a prediction that by 2013 there will be 1.5 billion browsers that support the latest capabilities such as AJAX and RSS in smartphones, with shipments rising from 76 million in 2007 to 700 million 2013. “The most recent commercial solutions from Opera, Openwave (NSDQ: OPWV) and ACCESS, as well as those using open source solutions such as Webkit, are targeted towards allowing consumers to access content on the web without limitations due to browser constraints,” said research director Michael Wolf. This will necessarily coincide with website designers optimizing their pages to run on mobile devices, or detecting what device is being used to access and send the appropriate data. “Ultimately, the long-term trend away from native applications to web-based applications means browser and web services engines will be increasingly important components in the mobile environment,” which will be a boon for content developers who will be able to develop for a few browsers rather than thousands of handsets. ABI also warned that the abscence of important plug-ins such as Flash on many handsets and the inferior capabilities of handsets compared to PCs means that server-side transcoding technologies will be around for a while. Of course, for content providers the important part of the prediction is the 1.5 billion people they will (theoretically) be able to reach without having to go through the carriers or another third party… There’s still the issue of getting people’s attention, but that’s been around for a while. (release)

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