It’s a classic underdog story. When a couple of engineers at web browser maker Opera suggested to management that they should try building a mobile java version of their browser, no one listened. Well, they built it and it’s about to outgrow its desktop bigger brother. Here are some stats for browser market share:

(source)

Another way of putting the stats:

• Opera Mini: massive growth.
• Opera: no growth.

In a couple of months time, Opera Mini might very well pass its bigger brother and place itself amongst the top 4 browsers on the net (including desktop browsers).

Amazing! Really.

Compare this to other mobile (and pre-installed) browsers such as Access Netfront with a 0.01% market share according to the same statistics and it becomes even more amazing.

Now, “0.39%” of web traffic might not sound too impressive to you, but if you ever have tried building an application for mass market mobile phones you know that it’s a huge effort even getting it to work on the devices out there.

Then you have to convince people to download and install it. If you’re lucky, the settings for internet access are correct in their phones. If you’re even more lucky, they manage to find the application in the menu system after it’s been downloaded and installed.

And, remember, the users already have a browser pre-installed on their phones. It’s a native application and supposed to be faster and better integrated to the device. Your browser can’t be equally good to the native browser, it has to be much better otherwise people don’t bother downloading it.

Then there’s the whole mobile browsing business, which hasn’t really taken off the way once predicted. First and foremost you have to convince people of the very idea that a web browser in your phone actually can be usable.

Well, Opera pulled it off.

Looking at the statistics, it seems like Opera Mini right now is the engine pulling the entire mobile web up to the domains of the desktop world.

Look at the September stats:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 77.86%
Firefox 14.88%
Safari 5.07%
Opera 0.87%
Netscape 0.72%
Opera Mini 0.39%

There’s not a mobile browser in sight, except for Mini (disclaimer: I don’t know the percentage of iPhone users in the Safari stats). The competitors are down at 0.01%-0.02%. If Minis growth continues, it will hit 1% within 6-9 months and become the number 4 browser.

There’s only one conclusion to draw: right now the mobile web is Opera Mini and Opera Mini is the mobile web.

Sorry, Russell, but that’s a fact.

Opera Mini is becoming so big it soon makes sense to develop web sites and applications targeted towards Mini as a platform. In fact, if you plan to take your web site mobile (and of course you plan to do that, you’d be crazy not to), Opera Mini is the platform to use to do that. As a bonus, it will work on the iPhone too.

Now, if only Opera could follow Apple and open up the browser for access to the phone hardware and underlying OS (via the J2ME APIs), that would make one heck of a platform for mobile development. (I’ve actually suggested this to Opera a couple of times, but the message doesn’t seem to have sunk in. Oh well, the last time was pre-iPhone so maybe they’re starting to get it now. JSR290 is the Java standardization attempt of basically the same thing. )

Interesting times to work with the mobile web. Maybe 2008 will be the year it really takes off. If it does, it will be much thanks to Opera Mini. Who said mobile java is just good for games?