By most accounts, Microsoft won the Web browser wars over Netscape. But if you ask Jon von Tetzchner how he can be sure that Opera's Web browser is better than Microsoft's, he'll look at you as if you've said something absurd. To von Tetzchner, the so-called browser war is just now heating up, and Microsoft has most certainly not won the contest. If you press him on the issue, he'll concede that Microsoft may enjoy a seemingly indomitable 90-plus percent share of the browser market -- but that's only on desktop computers, where Microsoft has an operating-system monopoly. On cellphones, where Microsoft and Opera will start off on a level playing field, Microsoft will have to compete on the merits of its software. And Opera will win out, von Tetzchner insists.

Von Tetzchner was in California in October to announce that Opera had solved one of the biggest problems of bringing the Web to cellphones -- fitting a page designed for a desktop monitor onto a few-inch-square LCD screen. During the last few years, engineers at the world's telecom firms and their industry standards bodies have been working at the same problem, and so far they've produced software that leaves a lot to be desired. The two main competing methods for accomplishing the same thing so far, WAP and imode, have essentially offered a watered-down version of the Web to phone users; most of the design features coded in HTML are truncated from the wireless version.

But the bigger color screens on smart phones, along with a larger allocation of memory in the devices, mean that the phones can now include browsers that display the "real" Web, von Tetzchner says -- pure, undiluted HTML.

Microsoft's smart phones ship with Pocket Internet Explorer, a slimmed-down version of the desktop browser that enables color surfing of almost any page on the Web. (Some Web features, like Flash and Java, will not work in Pocket IE.) The trouble with Pocket Internet Explorer, though, is that Web pages coded for a desktop screen are displayed on a phone's screen at close to full size, a situation that requires users to do a lot of clumsy left-to-right scrolling.

In Opera, engineers have solved the scrolling problem with something they call "small-screen rendering," in which HTML code is "massaged," von Tetzchner says, "so that it can fit on the screen." The results are intriguing; by examining the structure of the page, the browser produces a small-screen version that includes all the important content but requires only vertical scrolling. The system probably won't work for every Web site, but for the many sites that are set up as an index of links -- Salon's or any news site's front page, for example, or any blog, e-mail portal or e-commerce site -- it produces perfect results. (Here is a small-screen example of News.com's front page.)

Opera's innovation did not go unnoticed. The tech media picked up the story, with some on Slashdot predicting that the technology would propel Opera ahead of Microsoft in the mobile market. Tech analysts, too, said the system could provide a big boost to Opera's fortunes.

That analysis didn't come as a surprise to von Tetzchner, who has all but bet the company on the coming age of non-PC browsing. Although he says that Opera's desktop browser is more popular than ever, with about a million people downloading it each month, for the past two years the company has made more money from its licensing deals to phone and TV providers than from the desktop market. "We believe that more and more people will be using the Web in planes, cars, everywhere," he says. "This is going to be big. And this is the place that we can make the most money."

That prediction is contingent on Microsoft's smart-phone strategy failing to take off, and von Tetzchner realizes that waiting for Microsoft to fail does not make for the best of business prospects. Still, he says, "I'm not a quitter."

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