Slightly ajar

It’s not a full fledged!

What does the Chief Lizard Wrangler herself, Mitchell Baker, have in common with the Iraqi Information Minister? Well, judging by her recent interview with ninemsn then her spinning of the truth comes a close second. Not so far off Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field about full HTML browsers.

Mitchell Baker: Oh well all of them are difficult to shoehorn onto a mobile device, so we should be clear about that. Opera has done a pretty good job of getting something useful on to a mobile device, but it's not a full fledged [sic] and doesn't have the capabilities of Firefox.

I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she is talking about Opera Mini. Maybe that doesn't have all the features of Firefox, it is true, but that isn't the point. It is designed to work on almost any phone, and also compress data traffic so it is more economical to run, and faster to boot. We also have some exciting things in store for Opera Mini.

But the point is, that Mitchell conveniently overlooked, is we already have a tabbed browsing, Acid2 passing (it passed before Firefox), widget enabled web browser for mobile called Opera Mobile. This includes the full desktop rendering engine, is stacked with features, and can run in desktop mode like the Nokia and iPhone browsers. Except for extensions (which are probably not as useful as on desktop), I don't see what it lacks that Firefox provides. It is also available today. But we certainly welcome the competition in the mobile space, as we believe in the history and future of our innovation. Innovation that is unsurpassed in the browser space. Mozilla have talented people, so the competition should be fun.