Opera hits new milestone, but will Firefox join the party?

Opera Mini, the Java based web browser for mobiles that we all know and love, has hit an impressive milestone. According to recent statistics released by the makers, they now have over 15 million cumulative users worldwide. It’s most popular user base is Russia and the United States, with China a close third. And get this – more than 5.2 billion pages have been viewed via Opera Mini browsers.

Says Tatsuki Tomita, EVP of Opera Software: “We’re proud of Opera Mini’s award winning usability, but ultimately it’s a popular application because it is useful to everyone. We wrote Opera Mini in Java technology so that we could bring the full Internet to the largest number of mobile phones around the world.”

Meanwhile, over in the land of surf, sun and Silicon Valley, the Mozilla Foundation have got plans to bring their Firefox browser to mobile devices – but not quite yet. According to an interview conducted by Australia’s APC Magazine with Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker, Opera might have the market to themselves for a little while longer.

‘.. it is a long‑term move though — it is not in the next weeks or months. We had a small project looking at it but we decided that the right thing to do is to look first at the technology and look at our core technology and really tune it so that it’s best suited for that. We are at work on that now, however it will take a while.’

The interview – which reaches the giddy heights of over 8000 words, can be found here.