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On my N82: spent some time with Opera Mini after a while – had been using Nokia’s built-in S60 Browser exclusively over  the past few months.

Here’s a list of peeves and loves about each browser.

 

Opera Mini Good

• Faster page load times
• Snappier controls
• Smoother scrolling
• Slightly better font rendering (all of above relative to S60 Browser)
• Address TLD auto-complete: (type www.opera. and  a drop-down list appears with opera.com, opera.org , opera.net)
• Speed Dial-like shortcuts for bookmarks

Opera Mini Bad

• No support for multiple tabs
• “Small” font too small, “Medium” too big
• Screen does not occupy entire width when phone tilted (in portrait mode). I don’t think the browser is accelerometer-aware
• Not possible to copy URL

S60 Browser Good

• Does not ask for permission to connect; allows selection of default access point. This is because, unlike Opera Mini, which is a Java app, the S60 browser is a native S60 app.
• Page overview – a shrunk view of the current page which you can quickly scroll around on.
• Attractive Back/Forward implementation. Page previews flip forward and back, like moving your mouse across the OS X dock.

S60 Browser Bad

• Supports multiple tabs but cannot open new one!
• No “top”, “bottom”, “pgup”, “pgdn” keypad shortcuts
• Tedious process to copy URL. Bookmark current page, navigate to Edit bookmarks, copy URL, delete bookmark.

What else

Haven’t had a chance to check out Skyfire yet; the founders have decided, in a sadly common blinkered move, to limit launch to the US. A mobile browser from Mozilla’s been “just around the corner” for a while now (and won’t show up on S60 first). Google’s promised a mobile version of Chrome, but my guess is that Android will get it before S60 does. I don’t see mobile Safari on S60 ever. And it hurts to even speak of mobile IE.

Much has been said about Google’s open-source browser strategy after the Chrome release. The consensus seems to be that Google doesn’t want to win any direct “browser wars” (at least, not in the Netscape v/s IE sense), but to raise the standards for *all* browsers to run ever more sophisticated web-based applications. In other words, create a new “Internet platform“. Helps everyone, including Microsoft.

Noble enough, canny enough, bold enough. Except that no one’s talked about the gamble that’s implicit in the move.

Let me explain.

Suppose Google enhances its web applications using Chrome’s new capabilities – which it will. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader – now run almost as well as desktop applications. But only on Chrome. Now, these applications are more dependent than ever on the browser. In other words, Google is encouraging users to install a thin layer (of Chrome) on top of Windows to run their web apps. Perhaps Firefox will follow Chrome’s lead. That means 20% of the user base will be able to run the next generation of Google web applications.

But there is the remaining 80%. For that 80% of users, Internet Explorer is the receptacle through which they interact with the web. If Microsoft chooses to not play nice, Gmail, Google Docs, Reader will “break” on IE – that is, not render/function properly.

The average Joe’s reaction is to blame the “website”, not the browser. Example: The other day, the Yahoo! India mail website “broke” on Internet Explorer. My sister’s reaction was “Well, looks like Yahoo! mail’s not working properly, let me try Gmail”. Not “let me see if it works on Firefox”. Or my personal experience in cyber cafes in India: If the site doesn’t render correctly, “We’ll try after some time”. Not “Hey cybercafeowner, do you have Firefox on this box?”

In other words, if IE decides not to implement Chrome’s under-the-hood architectural innovations, it will end up discrediting Google’s own web applications, not IE or Microsoft. The average user is happy with his/her webmail (or other such apps). He/she won’t shift to a new browser, he’ll demand that the “email” work “as before”, or he’ll/she’ll switch to a new “email”.

No prizes for guessing that MS is hoping the new “email” is going to be Windows Live Mail.

So you blog, post comments, use Twitter, post photos on Flickr, videos on Youtube, talk with friends on half-a-dozen networking sites, and yes, send and receive tons of email. 

Which is all very fine. Until the day you die.

What happens to your digital possessions after you’re no longer around? It’s a question without a good answer, mostly because it hasn’t been asked often enough. Understandably. The Internet’s only been around some 15 years, and we’ve only begun putting personal info on the Web (Here’s a broad list) for about 5 or 6 years. In other words, very few of us from the Internet Age are dead yet.

But we’ll need answers in the next few years. Archiving and preserving a departed loved one’s online possessions is going to be a huge opportunity not so long from now. I say opportunity because things aren’t as straightforward in the online realm as in the physical, and there’s plenty of scope for smart thinking and innovative solutions.

Imagine you’re a startup that specializes in archiving digital creations. You’ve been commissioned by the departed’s relatives to preserve digital memories. Consider three issues you’d face:

Tracking:

What did your client (well, client’s loved one anyway, let’s just call him/her the client) create on the Internet? You can cover the obvious - email/chat/blog/microblog/photos/videos/social network. Then you get to the hard stuff: all the comments he/she’s posted on websites, forums he/she’s been active on, scraps/wall posts on friends’ social network pages, old email accounts he/she might have had in the past. and so on. 

Right now there is no reliable way of tracking this. How will you go about this?

Ownership:

Who owns data that your client had put up? The answers for some of these are straightforward - does Google own your videos on YouTube? Does Yahoo own your photos from Flickr? Read the fine 
print. But what about the scraps/wall posts your client wrote on his/her friend’s Orkut/Facebook profile? Comments on his/her friend’s blog? One view is that since they’re on the friend’s Orkut profile, they belong to the friend. The counterview is that scraps belong to whoever wrote them. 

Matters are further complicated if the client had stated before death that he/she wanted this sort of data deleted post-death. Will the owner of the blog that your client had commented on allow it?

Another question is about transfer of ownership. If Alice has had an email conversation with Bob that she would not want anyone other than Bob to view, should she have the right to veto the transfer of his email account to his next of kin? Perhaps she revealed her birthday and birth year to Bob. Could she veto the archival of his calendar?

Context:

This is closely related to ownership. Often, data by itself is useless without the context it was originally created it. A comment your client left on a blog post has very little value without its original blog post. A scrap/wall post or a “reply” tweet even less so. A pretty picture your client clicked and uploaded on Flickr is greatly diminished in value, significance and memory without the comments it sparked. A social network profile without the accompanying network is hardly social. But archiving the context along with your client’s content will raise the above ownership issues.

These are problems we haven’t faced with physical possessions because these problems never applied to them. How we sort them out is a both a tricky business and a business opportunity.