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The WDN Symbian DevZone... Small Screen Browsing, New Technology from Opera
by Richard Bloor, November 5, 2002
Browsing the web on a small screen can be a frustrating experience. Opera now have breakthrough technology that should make small screen browsing a breeze. This week Richard talks to Dag Olav Norem, Opera’s Smartphone Product Manager about the technology and what it means for web designers.
Browsing the Web on the small screen of a PDA or Smartphone can be a frustrating experience. To view the page you have to scroll extensively to find the information you want. Opera, who provide the standard web browser for the Symbian OS, have addressed a significant portion of this problem. Their Small-Screen Rendering technology eliminates left and right scrolling by displaying a web page in a narrow format matching the width of the device screen.
I spoke recently to Dag Olav Norem, Smartphone Product Manager, about the technology, its impact on web design and when it will be seen on devices.
WDN: There are clearly two obvious advantages to the new Opera browser for mobile phones, the elimination of left right scrolling and the fact that the rendering is done locally eliminating the need for a intermediate server. Are there any other advantages for the mobile web user?
Deg Olav: There are two aspects to why Opera is an ideal browser for small devices. Firstly the browser’s features and capabilities, secondly the Small-Screen Rendering solution which reformats the web pages.
We have some 4 million users who now use Opera daily on their PC for web browsing. It is the exact same rendering engine, therefore the same web experience, which we are porting to mobile devices. So a key advantage is that it is a full web browser on a mobile device, its not WAP nor is it a Lite version of Opera, it’s the full, real thing.
The new feature, Small-Screen Rendering, which can be turned on or off, reformats the web pages to fit inside the width of a small screen. With this reformat feature pages can be viewed without excessive scrolling. Without the fully featured web browser, that is able to understand the page before reformatting, this technology would note be feasible.
WDN: So it’s an option, the user can still look at the page as the author intended?
Dag Olav: Yes, obviously that would mean you need to scroll around quite a bit, but it may be what you want to do, so we will provide both options.
WDN: There could be advantages for larger format devices like the Nokia 9200 series, is this technology likely to target this type of devices as well?
Dag Olav: On a screen like the 9210 you are actually able to view most web sites in there intended format without any reformatting. The Small-Screen Rendering could be used but is designed to work best on screen 150 to 300 pixels wide. One of the things we try to do is compress the content and eliminate empty areas but the way we do it means that on a 640 pixels wide screen there would be quite a bit of white space, around pictures for example, so it would not be as functional. We will probably provide it for other screen sizes, as it will be a feature build into the engine, but I feel that Opera Zoom is a better way to view large pages on this type of device.
WDN: I would have assumed that the job of reformatting a web page is an intensive task, how have you achieved acceptable performance?
Dag Olav: If what we were doing was putting every thing on the screen and then shuffling it around it would be an intensive task, but this is not what we are doing. Rather we change or translate the instructions that are sent to the browser formatting engine before the page is rendered on to the screen. So we tell the formatting engine to do something different from what the original code instructions say. And that overhead is minimal and probably not noticeable.
WDN: While your web site is using Symbian based devices to showcase this technology I understand that it will also be available for other wireless and handheld OS's. You have already mentioned that the core engine is common, so how have you built Opera to facilitated cross platform deployment?
Dag Olav: What we have done is design a platform independent core, encompassing the entire rendering and formatting engine. Then we have a platform layer, where the integration with the operating system is done, and finally a User Interface layer that allows the native look and feel of the device to be implemented.
So we have the same core engine on Microsoft Windows and on Symbian OS. This means that any advances made in the engine, testing done or any user feedback from their daily browsing on Windows goes into the core and becomes available to all users.
The same applies to the Small-Screen Rendering, its part of the core so can be brought to a number of different Smartphone Platforms.
WDN: While you are suggesting that this technology can cope with any web page there must be some design considerations which would optimize a page for both PC web browsing and wireless Opera browsing. Am I right?
Dag Olav: While we are designing Small-Screen Rendering so that no changes need to be made to existing web pages you are right that there are some page designs that will be better suited to this technology.
For example, we treat the HTML code in the sequence it is written in the file. You will see the effect of this in the example of your web page. The left column is rendered first the center second and the right column last. So the main content is half way down the page. You will see from the examples on our web site that when there is no left column the main content appears at the top of the pages.
We are also working on compressing the long lists of links that sometimes appear in left columns so that you don’t have to scroll too much to get past then to the main content.
Other things which makes the Small-Screen Rendering work most efficiently is knowing the images size, which is something which can be defined in the HTML code.
Frames are also hard to handle effectively, particularly relative frames where clicking on one frame changes the content of another as on a small screen the effect would be on a non-visible portion of the screen.
In general though just good web page and HTML code design makes it easy for the Small-Screen Rendering technology to do its job efficiently.
WDN: If a designer does try and optimize their pages for both formats are there any tools they can use to check the result?
Dag Olav: We will make available the Small-Screen Rendering technology on the desk top platform. This will allow Web designers to review their pages.
Our motivation to create the Small-Screen Rendering was because of the lack of specific content for PDAs and smartphones. As these devices become more common specific content will be developed. With Opera web designers will be able to develop these services without having to learn anything new, before they needed to learn WAP and WLM, now they can simply use the standard HTML command’s to develop wireless internet content.
WDN: Web designers may want to start thinking about optimizing their pages, is there any more information available for them? If not when might it be available?
Dag Olav: At the moment the people who will be best to put this information together are the same people who are developing the feature. We certainly will be preparing more detailed information for web designers but this is likely to be done as the product is completed.
WDN: I understand that you expect this technology to start making an appearance in devices in the next 3 to 6 months, is this realistic?
Dag Olav: Yes we are quite comfortable with that in terms of development. As you know the Opera browser is already available on the Symbian OS on the Nokia 9210i. Small-Screen Rendering is currently in Beta within Opera, so it is sufficiently well developed that we are happy to show screen shots and announce the product, so its not far from being ready for production.
WDN: Are Symbian based devices likely to be the predominant or first platform using this technology?
Dag Olav: Releasing this technology is dependant on having devices to release it on. Symbian is very clearly the most important platform to Opera when it comes to small devices. We are unfortunately not providing a version for end-users of the Nokia 7650 due to memory constraints. We can run the browser for demonstration purposes on a Nokia 7650 but it does not leave enough memory for other tasks so a commercial release is not planned. However, if installed in ROM, Opera will work well on any Symbian device known today. As Symbian devices become available with more or extendable memory we do intent to provide the browser with this feature one way or another. Either through the handset manufacturer shipping Opera on the device or through direct sales to end-users.
We also have some development being undertaken on Linux so you can also expect to see it on Linux powered devices.
You can find out more about Opera’s Small-Screen Rendering on their web site (http://www.opera.com). We hope to be able to bring you further information on web design for the small screen when further information is available from Opera.
About the WDN Symbian Editor, Richard Bloor:
Richard Bloor has 16 years experience in the IT industry. His earlier
work was largely in design and development of commercial and
manufacturing systems but more recently has focused on
development and test management of government systems.
Richard Bloor is the Mobile Applications champion at System
Architecture consultancy Equinox of Wellington, New Zealand.
Richard can be reached at rbloor@wirelessdevnet.com.
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