Founded in 1994, Opera Software can justifiably argue that it is the oldest browser company in the world. Its vision is to provide a Web experience on any device. Why should we care? According to Jon S von Tetzchner, Opera’s co-founder and CEO (and contributor to IP Leaders), only 12% of phones are Apple iPhones, leaving a huge market for open source operating system Android to reach high- and low-end phones: “There will be around two billion desktop PC users in 2011, but the majority of the population doesn’t have one, so a viable alternative platform that can deliver the Web is mobile.”

Beyond the desktop and mobile, there are a host of devices such as in-flight entertainment consoles, wall pads, set-top boxes and tv games consoles that can offer the Web as the platform of choice: “Despite experiments such as WAP, there is only one World Wide Web,” says von Tetzchner.

He points out that few people use more than five applications on their PC – a browser, Office, IM, a graphical tool and perhaps one other more rarefied tool. Everything else is Web-based and most time in front of a PC is spent with a browser because it makes sense: “The browser is the glue for activities from making calls to watching films. Today, there is no real difference between a Web site and an application.”

Widgets - Web 2.0 applications that are essentially Web pages running in their own window with a browser are dynamic applications that act identically to native code applications. Opera widgets use Web technology such as HTML and Javascript, to render content and provide interaction, but are intended to work everywhere from a Linux or Mac desktop to a Nintendo Wi or a mobile device.

“The Web is the biggest open source community in the world,” says von Tetzchner: develop and test on a PC, for instance, and deploy across many platforms. It is fast and free compared with the cost and installation of a Windows-based application. Moreover, he adds, it is not just applicable to the desktop and mobile, but a “complete widget ecosystem”. Widgets will manage processes such as chatting on Facebook when you want to continue on a different device without having to close one application and open another.

“Our goal,” he concludes, “is convergence without compromise.”

Related posts:

1. Jon von Tetzchner, Opera Software….”One Web is all I Need”
2. The Future of Mobile Applications - The Browser vs the OS

Tags | Mobile Browser, Opera