Do you think Opera is a minor alternative? I really don´t have any numbers, but from my view, Firefox and Safari have been increasing their fans, as well as Opera has not ever been noticed as a strong competitor on desktops systems (do you know someone using it on his/her desktop? ).
Opera´s main advantage is its focus on mobile devices on the last years, which results are good: now it´s the preferred option for web-browsing on Windows Mobile devices, and probably also for less powerful devices (thanks to Opera Mini, whose 4.1 version was released recently).
Now Opera has played an intelligent move, with the new Opera Widgets SDK Beta. This SDK allows you to create widgets (mini-apps) which will work on desktops AND mobile devices (not only smartphones, even ARCHOS multimedia devices). So this cross-platform capabilities may be a good leap on desktop systems, we will see how well those widgets integrate and how much people likes and uses them. I would bet for a system who lets me use the same little app on my desktop, mobile, PDA, Nintendo Wii or other devices.
The SDK is open source and follows the same pattern of other SDKs like Google´s Web Toolkit or iPhone´s SDK (even in the logo image! lol). It provides useful libraries for I/O, RSS, Graphics, etc; as well as lots of info, an emulator and DragonFly (Opera´s Firebug).
Now it´s your time for installing Opera and trying some widgets from the Opera Widgets site.
Via XatakaMovil
Links Opera – Opera Widgets SDK – Opera Widgets site – Opera Widgets cross-platform capabilities – Opera Mini 4.1 released – DragonFly – Firebug
March 20th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
[...] hand, don’t forget that widgets already exist in Windows Mobile since, some months backs, the Opera’s widget runtime engine was released. The advantage of the Opera’s platform is that it works in Symbian O.S. too, but [...]