Wednesday, 30. May 2007, 17:48:09
Opera, nintendo, developers, wii
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Since I started working for Opera, I've made it a point to get to know more Web developers to find out what issues are important to them, what they think of Opera, and how the Opera browser can be improved to better suit their needs.
One thing forward-looking Web developers are very interested in is the shift away from the desktop when it comes to browsing. More and more people around the world are browsing on non-PC devices such as mobile phones. Opera is very proud to be a partner of Nintendo. As the makers of the Nintendo Wii Web browser, we are providing a state-of-the-art browsing experience that people are using in their living rooms.
If you are interested in making your website extra Wii-friendly (though the Wii browser handles most sites just fine without any tinkering), check out this excellent article by my colleage:
Making Wii-friendly pages
Wednesday, 29. March 2006, 00:48:21
Opera, Browsers, Internet, Web
Yesterday, I posted an article (on my other blog) about the way content on the internet might be getting 'thinner' due to the way popular content gets more popular while less popular (but sometimes just as good or even better) content gets ignored due to the way search engines work combined with the fact that people tend to repeat or directly replicate the most popular sources of information. To make sense of what follows, here's my original article:
Counteracting Sameness on the InternetHere is a question that came to mind:
Can anything be done at the browser level to encourage independent website owners to publish high quality original content on the internet, and to help out those who already do? After all, if Opera's vision "is to deliver the best Internet experience on any device on all major platforms" through its browser technologies, it makes sense that the content on the internet also needs to be of the highest quality.
My first thought was, "No, browsers don't have anything to do with the quality of internet content. It has more to do with individual users and the choices they make, irrespective of which browser they use."
Yet, we all know that design influences behavior. Perhaps there isn't much Opera can add to help this particular cause, but I do know there are some things Opera can avoid.
Here are two examples of what I mean:
1. Do not add (especially by default) search fields or menu options that run "
I'm Feeling Lucky" searches on Google. Even better, Opera users might consider changing the default number of search results shown per page from 10 to a larger number, like 30. On a healthy internet, for any given topic, there ought to be a whole bunch of useful and interesting websites, each with original content depending on the speciality of the site author. A Web that can be reduced down to one useful site per topic goes against the whole spirit of encouraging diverse voices and opinions.
When researching topics, don't just go to the first link on Google. Take a look at the 5th link, the 20th link, or even farther down. That's where the real gems are often hidden. Encouraging people to only visit the top link(s) jeopardizes the health of the internet, in that people lose incentive to produce high quality informative sites that don't make it to the very top of Google searches.
2. Do not enable link pre-fetching features. This is a
controversial feature of the Fasterfox extension for Firefox, in that it eats up bandwidth that small website owners (who typically do not have a ton of resources) have to pay for.
Are there any other ways that browser makers can encourage diverse and high quality content on the Web?
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