Facebook might be eyeing Norwegian browser maker Opera Software, if a report from Pocket Lint is to be believed. According to its “man in the know”, Facebook might be preparing to step into the browser market, in order to ensure that no matter what you are doing, you are always connected to your Facebook social graph.

If true, it’s going to be another stunning move by Zuckerberg. Opera currently boasts of more than 200 million users, with a very strong presence in the mobile arena. For many in the developing world, Opera Mini is the only means of surfing the internet. It also has strong relationship with leading handset makers and carriers. Facebook can certainly help Opera in expanding its audience, and Opera can embed Facebook into its user’s life. Opera also has a strong presence in the mobile phone and smart TV market that Facebook will find valuable.

That being said, acquiring a company like Opera is different from acquiring a start-up like Instagram. Opera has dozens of offices with hundreds of employees spread across the globe. Developing browsers is complicated stuff, and Opera has had to really fight it out to survive through multiple browser wars. Facebook and Opera have very little in common in terms of their products. In fact, they even have distinctly different cultures and company ethos. From where I am sitting, this certainly doesn’t look like a marriage made in heaven.

A couple of years back, when Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner was at the helm, I could have confidently said that Opera would never sell out. With the new management, I can’t be so sure. However, even then, it’s extremely hard to fathom that Opera will allow itself to come under Facebook’s umbrella. What might happen though is that Facebook and Opera might enter into a partnership. We have already seen Opera develop customized browsers for the likes of Nintendo. It might create and maintain a Rockmelt like browser with tight Facebook integration, in return for eyeballs and revenue from the social networking giant. But, in the recent past, Opera has been focussing on a more streamlined approach with less customized solutions.

When asked for a response, Opera declined to comment citing its standard policy of not reacting to market rumors.

After several dozen snapshots and months of testing, Opera Software has finally released Opera 12 Beta. Opera 12, which also goes by the codename Wahoo, was initially planned for late 2011, but was then postponed to allow the hardware acceleration feature to mature.

Opera Software is finally ready for the concluding sprint towards a stable release of Wahoo. The hardware acceleration and WebGL support is now stable enough to yield significant benefits on most configurations. Unfortunately, it still has some quirks, and is known to cause a performance hit on some systems. As a result, Wahoo’s most promising feature is disabled out of the box, and needs to be enabled by the user. If you wish to take hardware acceleration and WebGL for a spin just set opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableHardwareAcceleration and opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableWebGL to 1.

Recently, Opera was crowned the fastest browser by Tom’s hardware. Opera 12 introduces even more refinements to build on Opera’s existing lead. Opera is promising speed improvements by optimizing the network SSL code and using smarter tab loading to accelerate start-up and shut-down times. With Wahoo, Opera is also introducing 64 bit builds that are compiled to take advantage of the current generation processors.

In the past, Opera has made it clear that it is reluctant to follow Chrome’s process-per-tab model, even though Opera was the first to come up with the idea. With Wahoo, Opera Software has decided to at least offload plugins from the main process. In the newest builds, third-party plugins will run as independent processes. The expectation is that this would allow Opera to continue working, even if a plugin crashes. This should significantly improve stability, since a third of the crashes are caused by plugins like Flash. This very feature also makes it easy for Opera to run as a 64 bit application, and still support 32 bit plugins.

Other new features in Opera 12 include:

• Lightweight themes, similar to Chrome themes and Firefox Personas.
• Support for right to left scripts (Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Hebrew) in the main interface.
• Support for “Do Not Track” header.
• Redesigned security badges for the address bar.

• Improved standards support including lots of HTML5 and CSS3 goodies like WebRTC (native camera access), HTML5 drag and drop, CSS3 animations and transitions, and CSS generated paged media (new proposed standard from Opera for paginated content suitable for consumption in devices of multiple form factors).

Opera 12 also sees the departure of a few significant features. The first casualty is the IBM powered speech recognition and text to speech functionality (Windows only), which was introduced way back in Opera 7.6. The second feature to depart is Opera Widgets, which was introduced in Opera 9, and has since been made mostly redundant by extensions. And finally, Opera Unite, which was announced with much fanfare, is also being shuttered. Opera Unite is the feature I am personally the saddest to lose. It has perhaps been made redundant by the multitude of digital file lockers and media streaming services. However, it was something truly neat and also handy. It’s a pity that Opera did never figure out how to take Unite to the next level. The failure of Unite reminds of Google Wave, which also generated a lot of hype, but crashed as everyone struggled to figure out compelling use cases for the technology.

[ Download Opera 12 Beta ]

Opera Mini 7 for Android is now available for download from the Google Play Store. The feature set is fairly similar to the Opera Mini 7 for J2ME, BlackBerry and Symbian S60 devices, which was previewed in last month’s MWC. Speed dial feature has been bolstered to support unlimited number of speed dials. Find-in-page as well as tab management features have been tweaked to make them more intuitive.

There are also a couple of significant enhancements that are exclusive to the Android version. Opera Mini now supports Android Beam, which uses NFC for data transfer. Rendering performance should also be significantly improved as the latest release supports OpenGLES.

Opera Mini is the slightly less capable sibling of Opera Mobile. It was originally meant for feature phones that lacked the processing power required for a full-fledged mobile browser. However, it has since managed to find an audience among the smartphone users too. Opera Mini doesn’t render webpages locally. Instead it routes all requests through its servers where the page is rendered and compressed. A highly compressed static representation of the page is then sent back to the mobile user. This technology is both Opera Mini’s biggest strength and weakness. The compression enables Opera Mini to achieve massive bandwidth savings (up to 90%), and also improve browsing speed on slower networks. However, it also means that Opera Mini is unable to render some of the more dynamic webpages properly.

You can download Opera Mini 7 for Android from the Android Play Store or Opera’s website.

Opera 12, also known as Wahoo, lost several of its features to Tunny (Opera 11.6), which was an interim release meant to give hardware accelerated graphics more time to become fit for primetime. Tunny came out in December with a revamped mail client and several interface tweaks. Standards support was beefed up in a big way with a new HTML5 parser, ECMAScript 5.1 support, and support for CSS3 radial gradients. The latest Opera 12 snapshot continues this focus on standards with a host of goodies for web developers. HTML5 drag and drop – a technology that enables dragging of elements from one page to another or files from the operating system to a web page, makes its first appearance, as does support for CSS animations. CSS transition support has also been improved.

While including of support for the latest and greatest web technologies is always welcome, users often don’t feel their impact immediately as adoption of new standards invariably takes time. The good news is that the new snapshot has a couple of exciting changes whose benefit users should be able to feel immediately. The new snapshot introduces out of process plugins (OOPP) and 64 bit builds, which have been among the most requested features for a long time. OOOP increases stability of the browser by detaching it from plugins. So the next time your flash plugin crashes, it won’t bring down Opera with it. OOPP is also how Opera can manage to support 32 bit plugins in its 64 bit version.

You can goahead and download the snapshot from here. As always, the snapshot will be installed as an Opera Next build, and won’t affect your stable Opera installation.

Even though smartphones rule the roost in MWC, Opera Software hasn’t forgotten about its dumb phone users. Opera Mini Next 7, which was unveiled earlier today, introduces many of the conveniences of a smartphone to J2ME powered budget handsets.

Typically, Opera has dedicated its entire new tab page to speed dials, which are visual bookmarks that provide one click access to a user’s favorite websites. However, Opera Mini 7 features something called “Smart Page”. Speed dials are still there; however, they are now tucked away in a separate tab, and like its more abled sibling, Opera Mini now supports an unlimited number of speed dials. The Smart Page itself is an amalgamation of content from various places around the web, including social networks. Check out the video below to get an idea about how Smart Page works.

Opera’s CEO Lars Boilesen explained the rationale behind the new start page in the press release.

“When people think of using social networks on the go, they often imagine a smartphone with the latest apps installed. At Opera, we know that’s not the way a majority of mobile phone owners access their social networks. That’s why we’ve made ‘ordinary’ phones smarter, by making it easier to use the most popular social networks right in the first screen of Opera Mini for feature phones. Just because you’re on a more basic phone, doesn’t mean you can’t be a active social networker.”

Unfortunately, Smart Page is restricted to only J2ME, BlackBerry and Symbian S60 devices for now. Opera Mini for smartphones like iOS and Android also received an update. However, on smartphones the focus was more on improving rendering and performance than adding new features.

The preview release of Opera Mini 7 is available at opera.com/mobile/next/.

Opera Mobile for Android has been updated to introduce many of the shiny new features of Opera 11.6 and 12 to the mobile platform. The most visible change is the new “Infinite Speed Dial”, which supports bookmaking of as many websites as you want. Previously, you were limited to only 9 speed dials (visual bookmarks) in Opera Mobile. However, the biggest enhancements in Opera Mobile 12 are all under the hood improvements.

Opera Mobile 12 features the Ragnarök HTML5 parser that was introduced in its desktop counterpart a few months back. Opera promises better web apps and increased compatibility with websites with the new parser. Native webcam support and device orientation detection specifications of HTML5 have also been implemented. As a result, Opera Mobile 12 now scores a whopping 354 points on HTML5Test.com. Chrome for Android, which supports only ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich), and Safari for iOS score 343 and 305 points respectively. Head over to shinydemos.com to check out the fancy new capabilities of Opera Mobile 12 and compare it with your mobile browser.

Opera Mobile 12 also does WebGL, which even Chrome for Android doesn’t support. WebGL is a graphics library that leverages the GPU (graphics processing unit) of a device to render complex 3D graphics in a web browser. “Opera have contributed significantly to the development of the WebGL specification and now Opera Mobile is playing a leading role in the roll-out of GPU-accelerated WebGL on Android,” said Neil Trevett, Khronos president and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA.

Opera has always focused on trying to be available on as many platforms and in as many form factors as possible. In that spirit, Opera has also released lab builds of Opera Mobile that are optimized for MIPS and Intel architectures. MIPS is expected to be powering several low-cost Android tablets in the coming months. On the other hand, Intel is desperate to challenge ARM’s dominance in the mobile market, and will have a number of device launches across the budget spectrum in 2012. “Intel looks forward to a bright future with Android on Intel Atom processors,” remarked Doug Fisher, Vice President of the Software and Services Group and General Manager of the Systems Software Division at Intel.

Opera Mobile 12 for Android is available for download from the Market.

The Norwegian browser maker Opera Software, which had an excellent Q4 2011, has acquired two mobile advertising networks – Mobile Theory Inc. and 4th Screen Advertising, Ltd. The company expects the new purchases to “significantly expand its offering to advertisers and mobile publishers”.

Back in 2010, Opera entered the booming mobile advertising arena with the acquisition of AdMarvel for $8 million in cash. Soon after, Opera launched Open Mobile Ad Exchange, which helps monetize Opera Mini and Opera Mobile by inserting ads into partner websites.

AdMarvel is already having a significant positive impact on Opera’s bottom line. By the end of 4Q11, mobile advertisements delivered by AdMarvel reached more than 130 million consumers across more than 7,000 mobile applications and websites around the world. This represents an impressive 134% year-on-year increase. During the same period, Opera’s revenue in the mobile publisher (Opera Mobile Store) and advertiser area (AdMarvel and Opera Mobile Ad Exchange) grew over 200%.

The new acquisitions will help Opera sign up more publishers and advertisers by increasing the reach of its mobile ad network. 4th Screen Advertising is focused on UK and other European countries, and its advertiser clients include Coke, Barclaycard, Direct Line, Green Flag, Disney, Natwest, Warner Bros, Nokia and more. On the other hand, Mobile Theory is more US oriented, and has clients like Microsoft, Chevrolet and Coca-Cola.

“This is yet another important step in Opera’s quest to create even more economic value in the mobile ecosystem. Two years ago, we announced the acquisition of AdMarvel – which has grown to become the global leader as a supply-side platform (publisher platform) for mobile advertising. Last year, Opera helped generate well over $200 million in revenue for our publishers globally,” said Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software.

Opera will shell out $5 million in cash upfront to each of the companies, with $16 million being put in escrow ($13 million for Mobile Theory and $3 million for 4th Screen). Amount from the escrow will be paid out to the sellers in 2012 and 2013 based on revenue performance targets. Additionally, MT and 4th Screen can earn up to $32 million and $6.5 million respectively in earn-out cash for fulfilling aggressive 2012 and 2013 revenue and EBIT targets.

Social Media websites, whose very existence is threatened by SOPA, were amongst the biggest gainers in 2011, suggests a report published by Opera Software. The latest edition of Opera’s monthly State of the Mobile Web report, which is generated using aggregated information obtained from Opera Mini servers, takes a look at the top mobile websites at the end of 2011.

Unsurprisingly, Google Search topped the list, while Facebook held on to its position as runners-up. Wikipedia, Blogger, Spaces, Twitter and YouTube were amongst the gainers this year. Predictably enough, Wapdam, Orkut, Detik and Live vanished from the top 20, while Yahoo fell by a couple of spots. The top ten mobile websites, as reported by Opera are:

1. google.com
2. facebook.com
3. youtube.com (up 1)
4. vkontakte.ru (down 1)
5. odnoklassniki.ru
6. yandex.ru
7. wikipedia.org (up 4)
8. my.opera.com
9. yahoo.com (down 2)
10. twitter.com (up 2)

Opera Mini itself experienced a year-on-year growth of 80.6%. It finished November 2011 with 144.6 million users, a 3.3% increase from October. Opera Mini users viewed over 88.5 billion pages, which would have normally generated 13.2 petabytes of traffic. However, thanks to its server side compression algorithm, Opera Mini managed to reduce network traffic to less than 1.5 petabytes.

Most of Opera Mini’s growth came from Latin America and Africa. Asia, where Opera Mini has always been popular, continued to display impressive growth, but North America once again proved to be a tough nut to crack.

Opera 11.60 or Tunny is now available for download. Tunny is an interim release that is meant to deliver many of the new features that were originally planned for Opera 12 or Wahoo, which got delayed as hardware acceleration is not yet ready for prime time.

Opera 11.60 has a fairly impressive changelog for a point release. It beefs up Opera’s standards support in a big way. Besides a brand new HTML5 parser that is expected to improve interoperability and website compatibility, Opera Tunny ships with a new version of Carakan (JavaScript engine), full ECMAScript 5.1 support and support for CSS3 radial gradients.

The user interface has been refined further. The address bar has been streamlined. As a result, it looks a lot better and simpler, but is also somewhat less useful. The single click bookmark option (“Star button”) that has been a standard feature in most other browsers for quite some time also makes its appearance in Tunny. However, the biggest visible change is in the Mail component. The Mail client, which is used for both reading mails and RSS feeds, now operates by default in a three-column mode and features automatic grouping and pinned messages. Check out our earlier coverage for more on the improved Mail client.

Tunny isn’t a game changer, but brings forth an impressive list of improvements. Opera made a smart call by not letting a single feature hold back numerous other promising enhancements. Wahoo or Opera 12 will still be the release to look out for. However, Tunny provides enough reasons to be a must update for existing Opera users.

[ Download Opera 11.60 ]

Ever since its launch, Google Chrome has been gaining market share at a steady rate. Now, StatsCounter is reporting that Google Chrome has finally managed to surpass Firefox globally. Chrome’s worldwide market share rose to 25.69%, while Firefox slipped to 25.23%. Microsoft Internet Explorer also continued its slide and fell to 40.63% at the end of November.

Google Chrome gained 21% over the past two years, while Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera lost 15.94%, 6.98, and 0.2% each. Safari also managed to gain 2.255 market share since November 2009. In India the figure are slightly different as Indian users have typically been more reactive to market changes than Americans. Only 26.9% Indians surf using Internet Explorer, while 34.29% and 34.75% rely on Firefox and Chrome respectively. Opera controls a shade above 2.5% of the market share in India.

Browser statistics tend to be wildly inaccurate and inconsistent. However, they are still good enough to gauge the market trend, and in this case the trend is clear. Google Chrome’s rise in popularity has been nothing short of spectacular. Introduced in late 2008, it has won the hearts of millions of web users with its focus on speed, security, and simplicity. Although Chrome is undoubtedly benefiting from Google’s deep pocket and wide reach, the Chrome team needs to be applauded for getting their priorities right. Within a short span of time Chrome has made its presence felt with its innovative drive and commitment to web standards.

Firefox on the other hand struggled to ship the ambitious Firefox 4 update, lost out in the browser speed wars, and seems to perennially lag behind Chrome. Many fans believe that Mozilla’s lack of vision is hurting Firefox, which was once the darling of the alternate browser crowd.