Massive Growth Predicted For Phone Browsers

A report by ABI Research states that web browsing on smartphones will grow to 1.5 billion units by 2013.

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ABI Research says this segment of the mobile browser market will account for most of the growth over the next five years, as the open-Internet browser (OIB) segment for mobile grows from 76 million in 2007 to nearly 700 million browsers delivered in 2013.

“The focus today for mobile browser developers is to take advantage of the latest web standards while also developing solutions tailored towards the unique experience of using a browser on a mobile phone,” says research director Michael Wolf.

However, ABI also notes that despite the best efforts of browser vendors and handset manufacturers, “web usage on mobile devices has a significant distance to go in closing the gap with PC-based browsers. The absence of important plug-ins such as Flash on many handsets and the constraints of many phones compared to the PC mean that even OIB browser vendors continue to see a need for server-assisted architectures for transcoding and web acceleration”.