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Opera still on the fence about Silverlight

As I’ve reported before, the Opera web browser has less than stellar support for Microsoft’s Silverlight applications. During a net-meeting with Opera product executive Oleg Tukhin the Norwegian online magazine Amobil.no, my brother Ole asked if we will be seeing proper support for Microsoft’s Silverlight platform in the near future. The answer was somewhat ambiguous:

We continuously work on developing our products. Even though we in principle don’t see that the market will need Silverlight, we have a policy to support those technologies that people use.

This answer is as weird in Norwegian as it is in my translation. It could mean that Opera doesn’t think Silverlight is used enough for them to bother implementing support or it could mean that even though they don’t think Silverlight is used much, they are still working on supporting the technology. Nice vague political answer there Oleg.

Opera Mini on your iPhone? Not any time soon.

The Opera Mini browser for cell phones is popular application for cell phones. It can be installed on most Windows Mobile phones and the new Opera Mini 9.5 is the standard browser in the much sought after HTC Touch Diamond.

On the question of whether Opera Mini will make its way to the iPhone the answer is negative:

Opera’s vision is that we want our web browser available on as many platforms as possible. So there is always a posibility that Opera will become available for iPhone users. But right now we cannot confirm anything in that regard.

If you understand Norwegian you can read the actual quote here.

By Morten Rand-Hendriksen

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a staff author at LinkedIn Learning and lynda.com specializing in WordPress and web design and development and an instructor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. He is a popular speaker and educator on all things design, web standards and open source. As the owner and Web Head at Pink & Yellow Media, a boutique style digital media company in Burnaby, BC, Canada, he has created WordPress-based web solutions for multi-national companies, political parties, banks, and small businesses and bloggers alike. He also contributes to the local WordPress community by organizing Meetups and WordCamps.

4 replies on “Opera still on the fence about Silverlight”

Hi,
It’s Opera Mobile that is shipped with these recent HTC phones, not Opera Mini. Two very different programs, Opera Mini is a lightweight solution for about every phone using server-based compression, Opera Mobile is a full browser that needs a smartphone to work on.

If you think Apple will allow third party browser apps for iPhone, you might be a tad optimistic. As far as Silverlight is concerned, version 1 should work pretty good in Opera 9.5/9.6.

silverlight v1 works on opera if you install an unofficial patch that makes silverlight think you are using safari. and it will still crach opera on about 20% of silverlight v1 sites and almost 100% of silverlight v2 sites

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