Opera Mini 4.2 Beta Launches; Mobile Browser Now Has More Than 20 Million Users

Opera is releasing a new version of its popular Opera Mini mobile browser today, which should improve the time it takes to load pages and the ability to watch video on mobile phones. Along with the launch, the company is claiming to have more than 20 million users in November, which represents an increase of one million compared to the month earlier. The figures only include consumers who have downloaded the browser themselves, and does not include any gained through carrier relationships. The beta release comes at a time when the mobile industry is expected to experience its own version of the “browser wars,” which occurred in the early days of the Internet. In mobile, the browser plays a critical role because it has a hard to render full Web sites on small screens. Most browsers tackle this problem by having many servers running in the background that work to compress and shrink the data to load faster and fit better on the screen, however, many believe this process is not economically feasible. Opera Mini launched in January 2006, but others are rapidly getting up to speed, including Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), SkyFire, Mozilla and maybe even Google’s Chrome.

Although in Beta, the Opera Mini 4.2 beta will undoubtedly step up its game. It adds a new selection of skins, improved support for YouTube and other video services, and allows for sharing of notes and bookmarks between cellphones and PCs. Opera Mini users are expected to see faster browsing speeds because of a new server park that recently went online in the U.S. In September, Opera Mini users viewed more than 4.5 billion pages, breaking down an average viewers’ page views to 238 pages.

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