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Norwegian software house Opera Software has set the benchmark for a full mobile browsing experience on the phone, taking the world forward from WAP and succeeding in keeping Microsoft from grabbing the market as it did on the PC. So far the smaller company is reaping the rewards, announcing 158% growth in usage of its Mini product, as the takeover bids are thought to be piling up. Opera says it wants to stay independent, but it will be increasingly attractive as a full browser becomes a must-have feature of even midrange phones.

It is facing rising competition too, which might make this a good time to sell, while it is still ahead. The WebKit-based developments of Nokia, Apple and Google are increasingly likely to rule at the high end, and there are new entrants, notably the open source Mozilla Fennec, and Skyfire.

Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner wants the company to remain standalone because one of its strengths is the ability to work with any partner, even those that have their own browsers - while Nokia is increasingly focused on its own WebKit-based browser for Series 60, it uses Opera for its lower end Series 40 platform, which has rising importance in Nokia's overall strategy to steal a march on rivals in emerging markets for integrated web devices. "Some of the strength that we have is the fact that we are independent. We will work with everyone," von Tetzchner said at the recent Reuters Global Technology summit in Paris. "If we would be bought by someone it would probably very much limit our ability to play the role that we play."

Meanwhile, Skyfire debuts its 1.0 platform this week, available for free download to smartphones in the UK, France and north America. Ahead of launch, it was named The New York Times' 'App of the Week' and already claims one million users for its beta version, 0.85, which has been available for five months. Features include the ability to send web content by SMS, a 'super bar' similar to the Firefox 'Awesome Bar', and support for Series 60 and Windows Mobile 6.1. It also adds rich media functionality with support for standards like Flash 10, Microsoft Silverlight 2, Ajax and Javascript. Skyfire users can customize the start page with RSS feeds and the vendor goes with the trend to make the handset into a social networking tool - consumers can integrate Facebook and Twitter accounts to import status updates and tweets, and the browser can share and publish any web page to Facebook and Twitter networks with one click. The particular area where Skyfire is seeking differentiation from Opera or Safari is video, with one-click access to video sites and support for live streaming.

Perhaps the most anticipated open source browser has been the mobile version of Mozilla Firefox, called Fennec. This went into alpha release last fall, but only on Nokia's Maemo-based Linux tablets (hinting at a different browser strategy for Nokia on Linux, compared to Symbian). Now the alpha release has been extended to Windows Mobile 6.1. Key concepts include off-screen tabs and controls to complement what is centrally displayed - tabs are in a column on the left hand side while bookmarks and page turning lie off-screen to the right. This is designed to give the user more effective space and allow for more easily visible controls, especially on smaller screens (although Fennec also supports multitouch screens and auto-adjusts for different screen sizes). The full version of Fennec should be available by year end. Fennec uses the same base technology as the desktop version, including its HTML rendering engine called Gekko.

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