Scandinavian web browser provider Opera will be announcing today a new feature that allows users to access their bookmarks and favorite websites list (called “speed dial”) wherever they go.
Out of Opera’s three consumer offerings – Opera for Desktop, Opera Mini, and Opera Mobile – the first two will be able to natively load the bookmarks that you have saved to your Opera account. Your bookmarks will therefore show up as the same no matter which instances of these browsers you use, as long as you’ve signed in with your account and chosen to synchronize. With Opera Mobile, or any non-Opera browser for that matter, you will be able to access your bookmarks via a web interface at my.opera.com.
For those unfamiliar with Opera’s product lineup, Opera provides versions of its browser for an array of devices including the Nintendo Wii. There is only one standard version for the desktop but two for mobile devices. Opera Mini is a lightweight browser intended for cell phones that can’t normally support a full-featured browser. It supports a good deal of JavaScript but no Ajax, and it also depends on an Opera server to send compressed versions of webpages. Opera Mobile, on the other hand, is a more fully-featured mobile browser for smart phones that looks more like Safari for the iPhone.
Opera Link introduces competition for Delicious, which provides a useful plugin for Firefox that makes it possible to sync your bookmarks across browser instances. Soon, users will also be able to share their bookmarks with one another using Opera Link, thereby competing even more directly with social bookmarking sites.
This feature also represents one aspect of Opera’s attempt to turn the browser into a more sophisticated platform. Developers can already create widgets for Opera, and the company suggests that it may add more synchronization capabilities in the future, such as the ability to sync sessions, passwords, and notes.
Opera – which consists of about 430 employees – is based in Oslo, Norway but has offices around the world in places like Japan, China, and India. They just opened their first Silicon Valley office in Mountain View.