Opera: the pacifist in the browser war

Monday, October 13th, 2008

I’ve spent the morning chatting to a few guys from Opera, and a lovelier group of folk you couldn’t hope to meet. In a wide ranging chat over Espressos, we discussed everything from who the best drinkers are among the current crop of browser developers, to the importance of web standards. However, the one thing that really caught my attention was a point raised by Opera’s product manager, Roberto Mateu. 

“There’s places in Eastern Europe, Indonesia, China where huge amounts of people are leap-frogging desktops altogether and going straight on to browsing on phones. In those places 2.5G is going to be around for a while, and it’s about giving them a choice.”

There’s something in this. I spent a year of my life living in China and the culture surrounding the desktop is very different to Europe. Chinese people get incredibly subsidised packages on mobiles, and the network charges are buttons. Computers, on the other hand, remain expensive. As a result there’s a huge swathe of people using their phones to browse, and not touching the desktop at all. When they do, it’s generally in internet cafes and for gaming, meaning the browser doesn’t get a look in. This is now a cultural thing, a way of seeing the desktop computer and its potential uses. It’s also unlikely to change in the near future.

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The NeverEnding Beta (Google, 2004)

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

Remember when Gmail first arrived? Unless you’re unlucky enough to be called John Smith you probably got the username you wanted first time, and without having to add six digits on to the end. Then you experienced the fun of sending invites to your mates so they could join you in your exclusive little club – after all, Gmail was still in beta, they couldn’t have every Tom, Dick and Harry overwhelming it before it hit its stride.

Fast-forward four and half years and guess what? Google Mail, as it’s now known, still has that little BETA label under it, and it shows no sign of buggering off.

Over at the Royal Pingdom they’ve gone through the whole Google catalog and counted the applications that are in beta today. While 22 out of 49 may sound reasonable – Google is always coming up with innovations, after all – when you realise that these include Google Mail, Docs, and Product Search, you have to wonder if Google interprets the word beta in the same way as the rest of us.

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Requesters need to learn their place

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

Generally speaking, one of the things I like about Windows is the fact that you can do everything with the keyboard. Don’t get me wrong – when it comes to drawing pictures and such, give me a mouse any day. But when all I want to do is launch a program or select a menu item, I find hitting a few keys a far simpler and more efficient way of doing so. (This, in fact, is one of my major gripes with Mac OS X – but that’s a rant for another day.)

What I don’t like is what happens when some requester leaps up while I’m typing and steals focus from the window I was typing into. (more…)