Congrats to Apple and the Opera Team

With yesterday's news that Apple has approved OperaMini as a browser in the iPhone app store, competition in the mobile browser space took a big step forward.

http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20002310-12.html?tag=TOCmoreStories.0

Everyone at Skyfire was heartened by this decision by Apple, and sends congrats to Apple for being open to innovation and competition on the AppStore, and to the Opera team. It's a great step forward to highlight the value of server-assisted browsing, which both OperaMini/Turbo and Skyfire have long advocated. It also raises awareness of the value of consumer choice in browsers. As of this morning, OperaMini is the #1 download in the Apple App store. It's certainly great news for the browser space.

The Skyfire team has been watching the Opera submission and the iPhone/iPad market closely, and this will certainly accelerate our investigations. Nothing to announce now, but stay tuned for news. If you want to stay updated, please follow Skyfire on Facebook or Twitter and be the first to hear.

OperaMini will bring big speed improvements to browsing on the iPhone, thanks to proxy-server compression. We at Skyfire bring more than a focus on speed alone, but also a rich tradition of multimedia browsing, and so we are excited by what we can bring to all the mobile OS platforms that have adopted default Webkit browsers (Android, iPhone, Symbian v4, Blackberry soon, etc.). Starting with Android as we've announced (look for news shortly), we want to bring our tradition of great rich media and video in browsing to these devices. Our philosophy is that enhanced speed AND all the rich media of the web can be together in one browser, with a boost from cloud computing.

Skyfire and Opera are often categorized together as server-assisted browsers, and we both are. But at the same time, Opera has optimized their technology for speed, stripping out rich media, and since they don't support even mobile video (RTSP), users will quickly discover that speed on Opera is wonderful, but is not paired with video, AJAX, or other web 2.0 experiences. With Skyfire 2.0 coming soon, Skyfire will ally with the technology direction of html5, plus Flash and Silverlight support, webkit, AJAX, adaptive streaming to protect networks, and more. We're excited for the competition, and what we can add.

Congrats again to Team Opera. Well done, and leading the way for others.

Jeff