Today Opera announced that they had now reached 300 million monthly users, combining phones, tablets, TVs and computers into the mix. The even bigger announcement though is that they are abandoning Presto and are migrating over to the WebKit HTML/CSS rendering engine for its smarpthones, iOS and PC efforts.

WebKit started in 2001 when an Apple engineer began porting KHTML over from Linux to OS X. Being that KHMTL was open-source, WebKit would follow in the same steps. WebKit continues to grow in popularity as major browsers like Safari and Chrome are both based on it.

Opera hopes to further expand and make WebKit even better, and has decided that they would rather leave behind their own rendering engine and instead work with the open-source community. Opera has actually been playing around with WebKit for a while now, but the company now feels the time is right to fully make the move.

Before modern browsers like Chrome showed up, I personally used Opera, so I’m very interested in seeing where this latest development takes the company. Can Opera offer something unique enough to the WebKit experience to make them a competitive alternative to Safari, Chrome and the many other WebKit browsers?

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Instead of waiting for the package to be complete, it looks like Facebook is going about this by releasing bits and pieces at a time. You probably noticed the launch of the Facebook Camera app, for example, and this could simply be ported over as the native camera app on a Facebook phone. It just tacks on the Instagram filters and social sharing that everyone wants anyway.

There’s also a Facebook Messages app that is separate from the core Facebook app and this could bode well as the core messaging app on a smartphone, branching out to include SMS and possibly working as a powerful alternative to BBM or WhatsApp. And there’s already a Facebook app store too, so they’re fully prepared to tackle the iTunes App Store, Google Play, or Windows Marketplace.

The way things are shaping up, the Facebook phone will not be utilizing Android. Instead, it’ll be running its own dedicated OS, complete with its own app store, own messaging app, and so on. In fact, it’s rumored that Facebook wants to buy Opera, possibly to acquire the mobile browser for its new smartphone OS. The new OS will easily tap into existing Facebook frameworks for contacts, calendars, and other similar functions.

It’s hard to say when and if a “true” Facebook smartphone will hit the market, but it sure looks like they’re inching in that direction, one acquisition and release at a time.

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Some of you might remember how much hoopla Amazon played at their Kindle Fire presentation about how fast their wonderful, magic Silk browser is. Well, the circus left town for now, and folks who believed Amazon ended up getting something else instead of swift Silk. There’s a solid Silk browser test review published at Anandtech. In short, theoretical gains in speed for the Silk browser working with Amazon cloud servers can be severely diminished or even reverted by real life limitations of the Fire’s CPU, of  limits on number TCP/IP stack connections and corresponding bandwidth, and by RAM available for Silk operations on Fire. General advice is to not use the main Silk feature, namely “Accelerate Page Loading”, as it seems useless for the Fire at best, and even opposite results in most cases; slower Web page loading compared to “unaccelerated” mode.

The staff geek of Howtogeek website has compiled a simple set of simple measures that can make your Fire’s Silk feel silkier and speedier:

Open up the browser, hit the menu button at the bottom of the screen, hit the Settings button, and then find the following options:

• Enable plug-ins: off
• Accelerate page loading: Unchecked
• Desktop or mobile view: Mobile

You don’t have to change the browser into Mobile view, though we do recommend it. Just disabling Flash and the “accelerate page loading” made a big difference while browsing. You can also change the plug-ins to allow them on demand, but that usually ends up with a lot of annoying prompts, so it’s not usually worth it—it’s worth noting that YouTube still works just fine without the Flash plugin enabled.

What you see here as a result, is the Silk browser stripped of all its silk, so to speak. When in such a state, I bet it’s no different than the stock Android Webkit-based Gingerbread browser.

One thing is trying to improve the performance of the Silk browser, but its just mind blowing how attempting to “improve” it would cause a Fire user such grief that they would easily choose an alternative browser, like side-loaded Opera Mobile with its hardware accelerated Web page rendering.   More radical ways of accelerating Web browsing experiences for the Amazon Kindle Fire could be offered by flashing an Ice Cream Sandwich based custom ROMs on Fire, thus rooting it. That is, when these ROMs would be available for public consumption.

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Opera mobile 10.1 offers some features that are actually very cool. One of the most important features is the browser’s Turbo Mode. Turbo Mode significantly speeds up web page loading by compressing data to make the overall load smaller. For example, with Turbo Mode enabled (it’s able to be toggled on and off through the settings button on the browser’s main page) Opera will compress (decrease) the quality of any images on the website, as well as taking all formatting off the text. So basically, the page loads up with semi-blurry pictures, and all the text looks like it’s all in Times New Roman font. That may not sound very desirable, but it actually works great. During times when there is significant network congestion, this really comes in handy for continued speedy browsing, and even with normal network speeds, it makes navigation even faster than the native Android browser.

Another big feature is the ability to synchronize your bookmarks with Opera on your PC via Opera Link. I probably ask myself every week why Android can’t update their browser to sync with the bookmarks on my PC. Apparently the programmers of Opera Mobile felt my pain. In order to use this feature, you need to sign up for an Opera link account. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though, because you can use the Opera link account to access your favorite bookmarks from any computer as well.

Mobile View (also a toggle option within the settings) will render a webpage into one column the width of your screen, that way you won’t have to do any sideways scrolling. I personally don’t see much use for this, as I familiarize myself with most sites by their layout on a full computer screen, but I can see where it might be useful for reading a page that is very text-heavy.

Overall, I think Opera makes for an excellent native browser replacement, and with its exclusive features, such as Turbo Mode, and Opera Link, I may just make it my daily driver. Oh, and don’t worry, Opera Mobile supports Flash too!

Opera Mobile is available in the Android Market. It is a free app. Enjoy!

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Opera Mini Web browser for the iPhone approved

Opera Mini Web browser is now available free to download on your iPhone. Apple has given it the green light, but shucks, still no Flash websites.  If that were the case, Flash would be on the iPad next, and ya’ll know how Apple feels about that.

The title of Opera’s press release Monday came bluntly – Approved: Opera Mini App approved for the App Store.  Apple is no longer worried about its Safari browser being the dominant runner for web, it’s not like the Company nets off it much.  Compared to Opera, it’s super slow.  And why would Apple want to get on bad terms with a company like Opera, with that big robot Android lurking about there’s no second chances.  Now fully equipped with iAds, Apple is ready to open up their handsets a little more.  A secret weapon they’ve kept under wraps while distracting us with wild patents.  They plan to bring ads to apps by embedding them and its all ahead of Google.  Apple see’s it as a better opportunity to make friends with developers than have them constantly getting hassled.

Nokia has had Opera for several months, so should get. Get more cool tabs and super fast loading cached web pages, all fo free on your iPhone.

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Opera Mini 5 Beta 2 web browser for Windows Mobile devices without Java. Photo: Opera Software

What the Safari browser is to the iPhone, the Opera browser shall be to Windows Mobile devices.  Today Opera Software announced a native version of Opera Mini 5 beta 2 for Windows Mobile 5 and 6-based smartphones.  Opera on your Windows Mobile will give you a dramatic increase in browsing speed, tabs, and no more java.

How the browser works is by compressing up to 90 percent of the data traffic coming from websites before they get to your handset, thus delivering you a really fast browsing experience, and ultimately lowering your data fees.

The new version as removed Java, meaning it will work on any Windows Mobile phone, that’s a great thing for emerging markets where support for java may not always be offered on the majority of handsets. Features include tabbed browsing, password manager, bookmarks and Speed Dial.

“Windows Mobile deserves a mobile browser that looks better, handles better and delivers better than the default browser,” said Dag Olav Norem, Vice President of Products, Opera Software. “Even though Opera has 50 million satisfied Opera Mini users, we always seek ways to improve our browser for each and every mobile phone user out there. Now, we are pleased to offer the world’s most popular mobile Web browser as a native Windows Mobile application.”

You can also download Opera Mini directly from your phone for free from m.opera.com/next/.

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Opera taunted us back in 2008 with plans of an iPhone browser hitting the iTunes shop, but thanks to Apple’s approval process something got stuck and it never saw the light of day.

Browser alternatives on the iPhone are really just variations of Mobile Safari since they use the same WebKit rendering engine. If Opera indeed releases their own version of Mini for the iPhone, it could mean Apple has let off on a lot of things, and Opera’s rendering engine and server-side compression tools which make for significantly faster Web-page loading and reduces data surcharges, could change the iPhone’s browsing capabilities forever.

We don’t know what will be the real scenario with the Opera Mini, a press release from Opera fails to mention Presto rendering engine. Were not entirely sure and will have to wait for it at the Mobile World Congress to see if Android is alone in the Opera browser department.

More on what Opera has in store for us next week:

* Opera Mobile 10 beta 3 on Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile handsets
* Opera Mobile 10 beta running on Android handsets
* Opera Mini 5 beta, running on a variety of handsets and platforms
* Opera’s cross-platform Widgets Manager beta, running on Windows Mobile and S60 handsets

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