Opera Refuses To Perform On Microsoft Smartphone

[WnXP2002]

There has never been much of a relationship between the small Norwegian browser company Opera and software giant Microsoft, but what little there was is over, says Opera.

Opera, which recently launched its Small-Screen Rendering technology that makes it easy to read standard Web pages on smartphones, last week said it will never offer a version for Microsoft-powered devices such as the Orange SPV.

The announcement means that users of Windows-CE based smartphones are likely to be confined to using Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, which many consider inferior when it comes to smartphones and PDAs.

Opera's mobile browser, which is currently available on the Sony Ericsson P800 -- a smartphone based on the Symbian operating system -- and on the Linux-powered Sharp Zaurus PDA, uses a rendering technique that stacks the elements of a Web page vertically, meaning that a user only need scroll vertically to see the whole pages. Graphics are automatically reduced in size by the rendering technology, and tiny graphical elements are eliminated altogether.

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There has been an ongoing argument between these two companies that has been well documented on. For example earlier this month Opera released a new version of its desktop Web browser that turned Microsoft's MSN Web site into gibberish inspired by the Swedish Chef from The Muppet Show. The "Bork Edition" of Opera 7 was Opera's response to what it alleges are dishonest tactics by Microsoft to make Opera look like it is displaying pages improperly when users view MSN. This latest spat followed a similar incident in October 2001 when Opera won a publicity coup after Microsoft was exposed for blocking Opera and other non-IE browsers from access to its MSN site.

View the full story here at ZDNet [uK]

[Aaron]

Thanks, but already posted:

http://www.msfn.org/comments.php?catid=1&id=1262