Should the Windows Phone SDK offer support for such development

Oct 1, 2012 19:51 GMT  ·  By

Owners of Windows Phone handsets do not have too many options at their disposal when it comes to using specific applications to navigate on the web.

In Windows Phone 8, however, things might change a bit, given the fact that Microsoft has made a series of modifications to the development tools.

Thus, we might see Opera Software bringing its own mobile browsers to the platform, none others than the highly popular Opera Mobile and Opera Mini.

Vadim Makeev, web evangelist for the Russian Opera browser team, told WinPhoneLive.ru that the company would begin porting the browsers to Windows Phone 8 as soon as the SDK is made available.

The currently available SDK for Windows Phone does not offer the possibility to bring these two browsers to the platform, but the upcoming development tools should include this feature.

“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,” Makeev reportedly stated.

“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.”

Microsoft designed the Windows Phone 8 SDK with support for native code, which means that Opera will be able to port its applications to the operating system, should it consider it fit to do so.

As WMPoweruser notes, there is a chance that Opera’s browsers won’t be able to take full advantage of specific optimizations inside the OS, given the fact that Microsoft made a similar move with Windows RT.

One way or the other, the good news is that more browser options might be coming to Windows Phone in the near future. Hopefully, a specific release date for Opera’s apps, as well as for other similar software, will be provided soon, so keep an eye on this space to learn more on the matter.