Oslo, Norway and Barcelona, Spain – February 12, 2010
Opera Mini, the world’s most popular mobile browser, has crossed the 50 million unique monthly users mark in January 2010. This milestone proves the popularity of Opera Mini compared to other mobile browsers, as users seek out the Opera Mini experience over other options by downloading it on their mobile devices.
In just the past year, Opera Mini has seen unprecedented growth in every geographic location, with the number of users growing 150 percent from 20 million monthly unique users in January 2009 to 50 million monthly unique users in January 2010. These are not users who have just downloaded Opera Mini, but people who use the browser on an active basis, making it a market leader ahead of any other mobile browser.
Opera Mini is the lightweight mobile browser from Opera Software that can be easily downloaded on most handsets. The browser offers server-side compression, which shrinks Web pages by up to 90 percent before loading them on the device, speeding up the browsing experience and also saving users a substantial amount of money on their data usage bills.
According to Gartner, Inc., by 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide. With the speedy rise in the number of people browsing the Web from their mobile phone, users are picking the best software to surf the real Web on their devices – and that’s where Opera Mini comes in.
That statistic also explains the exponential growth of Opera Mini in the last few months. To reach its first 10 million users, Opera Mini took 28 months from January 2006 to April 2008. However, the last 10 million has taken only three months from November 2009 to January 2010.
What our CEO says
“Our original goal with Opera Mini was to make the Web available to everyone, regardless of their network or mobile phone. Fifty million active monthly users is a great start,” says Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera. “Opera’s innovative nature and its popularity among users will help us make the mobile Web even more accessible and attractive to more people across the world.”