Opera Next–the auto-updating test edition of the next major version of the Norwegian Web browser–is out in a new version, 11.50. It has a clever addition to Speed Dial, the page of thumbnail links to favorite sites which has been widely imitated since Opera invented it: extensions. Rather than just depicting shrunken versions of sites you’ve saved, Speed Dial can now include widgety little applications, such as the weather one in the lower left-hand corner of the screen above.

Like most browser innovations, Speed Dial extensions will only be interesting if they gets embraced by developers, who’ll need to build them in large quantities. And it’ll be be most interesting if it turns into a standard, so that users of all browsers get to enjoy it, too. But if you like checking out nifty new Web concepts, it’s worth a peek right now. As is Opera in general–every time I revisit this browser, I wonder why it’s not more popular. (According to Google Analytics, only one percent of you use it to visit Technologizer.)

Thirteen months after Opera’s Opera Mini browser became the first and only full-fledged Web browser that Apple allows to compete with Safari on the iPhone, it’s back in version 6.0 for iOS–and the big news is that the new version is optimized for the iPad as well as the iPhone.

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Opera has released version 11.10 of its namesake browser. It says its unique Turbo mode, which compresses Web pages on the server side before sending them to you, is now 15 percent faster. There are also some improvements to Speed Dial, the original browser “page with thumbnails of your favorite sites” feature.

When Wired hyperbolically declared that “The Web is Dead,” it didn’t challenge my worldview but rather surfaced what I knew subconsciously. The browser is not always (and increasingly less so) the best window to the Internet — especially on mobile gadgets. For years on my iPhone — and now on my Droid – I’ve foregone digging around in a tiny browser in favor of burrowing straight to what I want through an app – the New York Times, Facebook, The Weather Channel…

At this week’s Web 2.0 conference in New York, John Gruber of blog Daring Fireball tried to illustrate app supremacy by showing the absurdity of an iPad screen with only the Safari Web browser icon.

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DailyTech ran browser speed tests on Opera 10.6 (released last week) and the current version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 technical preview–and was impressed in both instances.

Mobile browser maker Skyfire is congratulating rival Opera for the arrival of Opera Mini on the iPhone App Store–and saying that it wants to put its browser on the iPhone (and, it sounds like, the iPad). Which is interesting not only because it’s a neat product, but because it could put Flash sites on the iPhone without putting Flash on the iPhone–like Mini, Skyfire caches and compresses sites on the server, but it goes further by transmitting everything–including Flash video, audio, and interactivity–to the phone.

Wonder how Apple (not to mention Adobe) would feel about that?

Three weeks ago, Opera submitted the iPhone version of its Opera Mini browser to Apple for approval, and I cheerfully predicted it would show up on the App Store within a couple of weeks. I was off by one week: Mini is now available as a free download.

I figured the app would make it because…well, I couldn’t think of a reason why it wouldn’t. Apple isn’t involved in epic battle with Opera (unlike, say, Google). It can be pretty confident that Safari will remain by far the iPhone’s dominant browser even if Opera Mini does quite well. And hey, making trouble for browser companies that wish to run on your operating system is demonstrably bad juju.

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Norwegian browser company Opera Software wants to be the second company to release a browser for the iPhone–after Apple, of course. And so it’s announcing today that it’s submitted Opera Mini to Apple for App Store approval. Opera says that it considered charging for the app, but has decided to give it away.

The company touts its server-side compression technology as making Opera Mini up to six times faster than Apple’s Mobile Safari. When I tried Mini on the iPhone last week at the South by Southwest conference, I didn’t see that speed boost–but an Opera representative recently told me that Mini was misconfigured at SxSW. And I was impressed with the browser in other ways.

Will Apple approve Mini? Assuming that it follows the iPhone developer agreement and doesn’t involve security risks, I think it would be a horrible mistake if it didn’t. Safari is going to be the iPhone’s dominant browser no matter what, and spiking Mini would resurrect Google Voice-like concerns that Apple is unwilling to permit competitors to build iPhone apps that rational people might prefer to Apple’s own wares.

It’ll be good for iPhone owners, Opera, Apple, and the American way if Apple approves Mini without delay. And I’m in an optimistic mood. So I’m hereby predicting that it’ll show up on the App Store within the next couple of weeks.

Here at South by Southwest Interactive, I finally got a little hands-on time with Opera Mini for the iPhone, which Opera started showing off last month at the Mobile World Congress Show in Barcelona.  The Norwegian browser company told me that it’s still putting the finishing touches on it and plans to submit it to the iPhone App Store real soon now.

On every platform it runs on, Opera Mini’s signature feature is that it’s speedy, thanks to server-side compression that crunches Web pages down before they get sent to the browser. In my extremely informal experiments here at SXSW, Mini didn’t feel particularly zippy. (Actually, it loaded the New York Times’ home page more slowly than Mobile Safari did.) But it may not have been a real-world test of how it’ll perform when Apple approves it (please!) and it shows up on the App Store: An Opera representative told me that the compression is still going on via servers in far-away Norway, which would tend to bog things down.

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Opera has released a beta of its Opera Mini 5 browser for Google’s Android OS. Mini’s signature feature is the way it caches and compresses Web pages on the server side so they’re relatively snappy on a phone even via a sluggish wireless connection. As its name suggests, Mini started out as a pretty basic browser, but version 5 is full-featured for a phone browsser: It’s got tabs, a password manager, and Opera’s Speed Dial feature that provides one-click access to favorite sites.

In my brief time with Mini 5 so far on a Verizon Droid, it felt fast but not strikingly faster than the standard Android browser (an experience which PCMag.com’s Sean Ludwig also encountered). Formatting is never as faithful as in the stock browser, and some of the sites I visited with the beta looked just plain wonky. But on the plus side, Mini let me get into one Web site–the back-end part of WordPress.com I use to update Technologizer–which I haven’t been able to access with the bundled Android browser.

Worth a look if you’re a browser buff with an Android phone (and I’m glad that Android users have the option of choosing Mini–here’s hoping that iPhone owners get to choose, too).

Opera has released a Mac version of Opera 10.50, whose Windows version impressed me when it came out a couple of weeks ago. Like that version, it uses Opera’s new JavaScript engine, which Opera says is eight times faster than its predecessor.

How does it perform? Well, Seth Weintraub of Computerworld and 9 to 5 Mac used the SunSpider test to put it through its paces, and found that it beat Safari and Chrome, the fastest OS X browsers in terms of JavaScript.

Zippy JavaScript performance doesn’t automatically translate into a browser that feels zippy. Judging from the time I’ve spent with Opera 10.50 today, though, it does indeed feel like an unusually fast browser in ways that earlier versions of Opera didn’t. (It also feels like a beta–it crashed on me while I was posting this articles–and so I’d suggest trying it as a complement to your main browser rather than a substitute.)

One of the things I like about the the Windows version is its Chromelike minimalist interface, which compresses all of Opera’s options into a single menu. Like Chrome, Opera isn’t so sleek on OS X–it’s got eight menus, plus the Apple menu and the Opera one. That’s at least in part because one of the most fundamental differences between the Windows and Mac interfaces is that OS X has a fixed menu bar at the top. If you start to remove menus from it, it doesn’t conserve space and leaves the bar looking a little naked.

Google Analytics tells me that 98.5 percent of Technologizer community members aren’t using Opera. On both OS X and Windows, I’m excited about 10.50′s potential to be the first version of Opera in a long while that tempts users of other browsers to switch allegiences.

Engadget’s Thomas Ricker is in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress. He got a preview of Opera’s Opera Mini browser for the iPhone and was impressed by its speed. He was also confused by Opera’s unwillingness to let him share any images of it in action. And of course, there’s no guarantee that it’ll ever be available in Apple’s iPhone App Store. (Actually, the odds seem against it.)

Please, Apple, surprise us by promptly approving this app so we don’t need to waste any time or brain cells squawking about it…

Norwegian browser company Opera has released a Windows beta of version 10.50–a follow up to 10.0, which shipped back in September. It’s definitely a beta–it’s not available at all for the Mac or Linux yet, and quirky enough that I couldn’t post this article using it–but it’s a promising one. And all the changes make Opera feel more like its much younger rival Google Chrome.

Opera’s makers are calling version 10.50 “the fastest browser on earth,” apparently based on the performance of its new JavaScript engine, which the company says is eight times faster than the old one. (The previous engine performed poorly compared to other browsers in the SunSpider benchmark test.) Judging browser speed based largely on JavaScript doesn’t make a lot of sense, but all of Opera’s competitors except Microsoft do it, too.  (It may not be a complete coincidence that IE is the other browser besides Opera that lags in the SunSpider test.)

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Norwegian browser company Opera, which has been talking about an iPhone version since 2008, is no longer just talking. It says that it will demonstrate an iPhone edition of its Opera Mini phone browser next week at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona. And that’s all it’s said so far.

Opera seems to be following the increasingly common strategy of publicly announcing it’s working on something interesting for the iPhone in hopes of making of more difficult for Apple to reject the program once it’s submitted. But if Apple did approve an alternative browser such as Opera Mini, it would be startling–it presumably incorporates a JavaScript interpreter, and that interpreter presumably violates a clause in the iPhone developer agreement that prohibits apps from including interpreters of any sort.

I hope, however, that Opera does submit Opera Mini, and that Apple startles us all by accepting it. The single most disturbing thing about the restrictions that Apple puts on iPhone developers is their tendency to eliminate applications that compete with Apple’s own software–it’s bad for iPhone owners. And ultimately it might be bad for Apple, if it tends to leave the company more complacent than if Safari and other programs faced competition on the iPhone itself.

Does the world need Opera Mini for the iPhone? Maybe: Mini is a fine basic browser on other phones, and it compresses Web pages on the server side in order to deliver the fastest possible rendering on the phone. Which might make it particularly useful when the best speed you can get out of AT&T’s network is pokey EDGE. Whatever Mini is, it isn’t a boring, pointless knockoff of Safari…

Norwegian browser stalwart Opera released the first beta today of Unite, its technology which puts a Web server inside the browser, letting Opera run apps that serve content up to the Web as well as download it. (You need to run Opera to use Unite, but the information the apps deliver–such as access to your music and photos–can be gotten to with any desktop browser.)

Unite first showed up last June as an alpha that was accompanied by some of the most excessive hype ever attached to a product that didn’t hail from Cupertino–the company said it “would forever change the fundamental fabric of the Web.”  I understand that changing the fundamental fabric of anything takes more than a few months, but Unite got off to a rocky start, suffering issues related to both reliability and privacy.

The new version of Unite has tighter security (including features to prevent  Unite apps from getting indexed by search engines unless that’s what you want, and more rigorous password features). The initial group of apps–such as a music server, a photo-sharing tool, and a virtual refrigerator that friends can tack notes onto–have been joined by some additional ones from Opera and other companies, including an instant messenger and a Twitter client:

Opera has also ratcheted down the hoopla, at least a little: The new release is accompanied by a quote from CEO Jon von Tetzchner talking about “moving closer to our goal of reinventing the Web.”

I still think Unite is an interesting idea, but it’s not a fully-realized one, nor one whose advantages are immediately obvious. (Some of its downsides, on other hand, are easy to grasp–such as the fact that Unite apps only work as long as your PC is turned on and connected to the Internet).

There are only a few Unite apps so far, and none of them feels anything like a killer app. Most of them, in fact, might leave you saying “Explain to me again why this is better than using a traditional Web service that doesn’t run on my computer?” (For instance, the Twitter client is extremely rudimentary, as you can see from the image above.)

Anyhow, if nothing else, Unite serves as a good excuse to give Opera a try. It’s a really good browser overall, and at the moment, it’s my primary one–I’ve been having trouble with both Firefox and Opera under Snow Leopard, and so I’m living with Opera and seeing if it suits me better…

Cloud-based services are changing everything about computing–and they’re having an impact in some pretty unexpected places. Such as the Nintendo Wii, where some clever folks are utilizing the console’s Opera browser to deliver nifty little free games that even take advantage of the Wii Remote and provide online play. Jared Newman has rounded up ten of his favorites–try ‘em all!

View Free Wii Browser Games slideshow.