Opera Mobile and Opera Mini have been popular choices for users back in the early days of smartphones. This is before the days of Safari on the iPhone, when pocket IE was barely usable. However the Opera browsers still remain a popular choice for several Android users, and even for users on the Symbian platform, where the stock web browser is still inferior.
Opera has remained a relevant player not only because of the more than decent primary browser, but also thanks to Opera Mini, which can make wonders when it comes to saving some precious megabytes from your data plan.
Opera's Vadim Makeev has recently said that Opera is interested in bringing its two mobile browsers, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini to Windows Phone 8. If you wonder what's the cause for Opera's sudden interest in Microsoft's upcoming platform, it's because the Windows Phone 8 SDK is going to allow developers to code their apps in C, which was not possible on WP7. And since this allows Opera to use a lot of generic code written in C, it should be a piece of cake for the company to port its products to Windows Phone 8. Here's the official statement:
Unfortunately, we do not comment on timing. I can say one thing, as soon as the ability to release Opera Mobile/Mini for Windows Phone (SDK in this case) is available, we will immediately do it. That is a full SDK for developing in C, for which we could use an existing generic code written for all platforms. Not with the current SDK for the Windows Phone platform. As soon as it appears, we are porting Opera Mobile/Mini.
Microsoft has done a great job with Internet Explorer on Windows Phone, so we are not certain how popular Opera can be on the platform. Still the fact that users have options along with Opera's unique features could be enough to help a few users swap over from Android or iOS to Windows Phone.
source - Neowin
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