According to a new study carried out by ABI Research, 3.8 billion mobile handsets will contain mobile web browsers by 2015.
This figure equates to more than 60% of the installed base of mobile handsets worldwide, doubling today’s penetration rate.
Currently, it appears that mobile browsers are evolving along two paths. Full internet browsers are highly sophisticated and are found in all smartphones and feature phones.
These devices are able to support this type of browser due to their advanced application processors, expanded memory capacity and adequate screen size.
Alternatively, the proxy based or compression browser is available, such as the Opera Mini. These browsers are able to move a percentage of the caching and processing from the phone to a nearby server, allowing the browser to run on lower cost processors and requiring as little as 4Mb of memory.
Because of this, these browsers are able to support the low cost phones that are on the market.
The research suggests that the installed base of full internet browsers will exceed that of proxy-based browsers in 2012 and by 2015, 3.8 billion mobile handsets will contain mobile web browsers.
