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Opera CEO: dotMobi a "total waste of time"
Yesterday's announcement that the dotMobi registry will begin an RFP process to allocate sought-after mobile Internet domain names was news to a lot of people…but not Jon von Tetzschner, CEO of web browser developer Opera Software, who declared the idea a "total waste of time" and "completely unnecessary."
In an interview with SciFi.com, von Tetzchner rails against the dotMobi concept, arguing "There should be one Internet. What if you're using another device? Should we have .gameconsole? .car? .fridge? .plane? We don't need .mobi at all." He adds the mobile Internet should just leave well enough alone: "There are capabilities for sites to query the browser to figure out exactly what you're using. That's a much more elegant solution than having the user choose which site to go to." More and more, dotMobi is becoming the domain the industry loves to hate.
For more of the von Tetzschner interview:
- read SciFi's article
Comments
I’m not arguing the point for or against .mobi today but for Opera to say "There are capabilities for sites to query the browser to figure out exactly what you're using.†is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, and somewhere where they need to get their own house in order first! Whereas a default handset WAP browser does identify the handset make/model when connecting with a server, the Opera browser – if downloaded directly by a consumer – only identifies itself as an Opera browser and provides no information on the handset. A similar situation exists for all 3rd party mobile browsers downloaded by consumers. In general, consumers get a much better experience browsing optimised xHTML sites on their handset’s default WAP browser, be that .com, .mobi, or .anythingelse
I couldn’t agree more! Dot mobi is an utter waste of time unless you are a registrar. If you are a registrar, it’s a dream come true. What a great opportunity to defraud the masses by pedalling what will become yet another worthless third rate extension.
The only upside is that the vast majority of those that will get conned by the dot mobi fraud will be semi-literate, stay-at-home, unemployed, retarded domain name speculators. These are people who make the net less than what it otherwise would/could be and don’t deserve a great deal of sympathy anyhow.
Let’s face it, who the hell needs another stupid (and in this case, obscure) extension to remember!!!!!!!
I totally agree that there is no need for .Mobi or .fridge! Another hype to promote data service usage on mobile devices, yet no one is getting it!
I agree with Biscoe that Opera is not helping in any way with their browser as it does not give you information about the device. In fact, what value does the Opera Browser give over the existing WAP Browser? I hope it's not a total waste of time
Thanks
Ghazi Ramadan
www.iotasphere.com
The underlying problem is one of discoverability -- browsing the mobile web is hard, even with a 3G connection and a high-end smartphone.
Besides, Opera does at least a half-way decent job of rendering most desktop HTML pages on a small screen, so dotMobi is especially unhelpful from von Tetzschner's position.


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