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The mobile browser world never stays still for long, and this week sees activity from the leading independent cellphone browser maker, Opera, and from its would-be challenger, Firefox.

Opera today announced its Cross-Platform UI technology. This is already available to consumers as part of the Mobile 10 and Mini 5 browsers - the latest releases of the main Opera products, one a fullblown product, the other cutdown for resource constrained handsets. Now the system is being targeted at OEMs and operators to be pre-integrated into products as the default browser.

Success in this area will be essential for Opera to continue to compete effectively against the vendor's own browsers. Many suppliers now have their own offerings, which they preload with their devices, and most are based on WebKit. But most of these are tied to smartphone OSs, while the huge base of webphones and featurephones remains a major opportunity for the highly efficient Opera (it works with Nokia on the lower end Series 40, for instance, even while the Finn is focusing on its own developments for Series 60.)

The new Opera platform promises OEMs and carriers the ability to create a common user interface across their whole portfolio, and supporting key mobile web techniques such as widgets. Creating a unified look and feel over multiple systems, and thus neutralizing the politics of the OS wars, is a key goal of many cellcos. The Opera framework is built on top of the browser engine, and taps into the growing trend for the browser to morph into the main OS, as with Chrome OS. The framework is optimized for efficient execution of dynamic UIs for browsers, says the software house.

"Because no operator offers just one type of mobile phone, Opera has developed a new UI solution that can be deployed on multiple phones and platforms. Due to its pure versatility, the cross-platform UI framework can be customized by Opera to meet brand requirements," said CEO Jon von Tetzchner.

Opera has also announced availability of Mobile 10 for Android and Qualcomm Brew, joining Symbian and WinMo.

Meanwhile, Mozilla is putting the finishing touches to the long awaited Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, and it will launch within two weeks. Although Firefox claims about 25% share of the PC browser space, it has fallen behind in mobile, and threatens to be outshone by the open source WebKit platform, used in the iPhone, Palm Pre, Android and others.

Despite Google's own technology, Mozilla is relying heavily on the proliferation of Android devices to take Fennec with them into the mass market next year. The product is also in beta release on Nokia Maemo and in alpha for Windows Mobile, but with so many companies hoping to launch Android gadgets in 2010, the browser firm thinks some will opt for a differentiated browser experience and adopt Fennec.

For consumers actively choosing to download Fennec, it believes it will score because of its large installed PC base, and it allows users to sync between the two browsers with Mozilla Wave. Also, Fennec leverages touchscreen functionality efficiently and employs the same version of the Gecko layout engine used by Firefox 3.6.

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