Opera promises to bring Opera Mobile/Mini to Windows Phone, if the SDK supports it

WinPhoneLive.ru spoke to Vadim Makeev, web evangelist for the Russian Opera browser team and asked them about support for Windows Phone.

He received the following response:

Unfortunately, we do not comment on timing. I can say one thing, as soon as the ability to release Opera Mobile/Mini for Windows Phone (SDK in this case) is available, we will immediately do it. That is a full SDK for developing in C, for which we could use an existing generic code written for all platforms. Not with the current SDK for the Windows Phone platform. As soon as it appears, we are porting Opera Mobile/Mini.

The Windows Phone 8 SDK of course does support native code, which should allow Opera to port their browser easily but it is likely, just like Windows RT, it does not support specific optimizations which makes Javascript execution much faster. On the other hand an Opera Mini browser, which would still achieve the goal of saving data, would not need those optimizations.

Are our readers still ready to welcome an Opera browser, or has improvements in IE 10, which is after all one of the fastest browsers around, caused that ship to sail? Let us know below.