Opera highlights huge growth of the mobile web

Opera reported a surge in mobile web use in South Africa during the World Cup

Browser firm Opera has released its latest stats, choosing to commemorate the World Cup season with its own qualifying competition.

Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder of Opera Software, explained that, as with the real competition, browser companies are pitted against each other and their mobile web browsing figures calculated and compared to produce a winner.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this competition did not mirror that seen in South Africa, and Spain was not the winner.

"Our results were quite different from the real games, with Chile and Argentina advancing to the final match," said von Tetzchner in the firm's latest State of the Mobile Web report. "Chile squeezed by Argentina by just 4.1 pages-per-user on that day to win."

South Africa was a big winner in the Opera tables, and saw the biggest increase in use of the mobile web. Overall, page views in the 12 South African countries increased by 182 per cent, the number of unique users by 124 per cent, and the amount of data transferred by 160 per cent during the past 12 months.

This growing trend is seen globally too, and Opera said that 59.4 million people used Opera Mini in June. These mobile web browsers were served 27.3 billion pages, while helping to lessen the load for data travellers, Opera was able to compress some 3.8 petabytes of operator data for its users.

Data served via Opera Mini is compressed by as much as 90 per cent, the firm explained.

Although page views have fallen since May - Opera said that there had been a drop of 3.4 per cent - they still showed major gains, 161.8 per cent, year on year.

In the UK, page views grew by 90 per cent against June 2009, and Opera added about 40 per cent to its user tally. Over the course of the month the average user looked at some 306 pages, with Facebook and Google being the two most popular destinations.

The most popular handset for mobile browsers using Opera was the iPhone 4, followed by the Sony Ericsson W395 and the Nokia 2330c.

Keeping with the football theme, the most popular sports web site in the UK accessed via Opera Mini was Sky Sports, which beat the FA site into second place.