Opera gains 100 million users through deal with Microsoft

Opera has gained an estimated 100 million users through a deal with Microsoft. Microsoft dropped the Nokia Xpress browser on the Asha phones, with the S30 or S40 operating system, in favor of the mobile browser of the Norwegian company.

Due to the deal, which was announced in August, new Asha devices from Microsoft have Opera Mini as the browser by default. In addition, the American company encourages users to exchange the Xpress browser for the Norwegian browser. Opera told The Wall Street Journal that approximately 100 million Asha users are currently switching from Xpress to Opera.

With the agreement it seems that Microsoft wants to get rid of the development of its own browser for cheap phones. Microsoft got its hands on Xpress and the Asha line after the acquisition of the telephone branch of the Finnish Nokia, earlier this year. However, it continues to make cheap devices under the Nokia brand.

Xpress is based on Mozilla’s Gecko engine and can compress web pages to save data. Opera Mini also differs from many other web browsers in that Opera serves pages via its own server, compressing images so that the phone also needs to retrieve less data. Microsoft is doing something similar with its Data Sense service for Internet Explorer on Windows Phone.