While 50 million desktop users means just a tiny fraction of the browser market for home users, 50 million mobile users actually represents a dominance in the mobile browser market.

According to the latest numbers by StatCounter, Opera for the desktop comes in fifth (essentially last) place, behind Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Opera accounts for just under 2% of the browser market, while IE holds 53% of the market share, and Firefox comes in around 32%. Safari, Opera's nearest competitor (and default Mac browser) accounts for twice as many users as Opera.

Looking at the mobile browser numbers, on the other hand, we see Opera Mini with 28% and iPhone's native browser following with just under 20%. And all of that could change, of course, if Apple would just accept Opera Mini into the AppStore. Opera submitted its mobile browser just under three weeks ago at the time of this writing, but has a policy that prevents other browsers from operating on the iPhone.

While the numbers seem to say that Opera just isn't cutting it on the desktop, Opera Mini has been holding the lead as far as mobile browsing goes and we'd sure love to see it on the iPhone sometime in the near future.

How do we know this? Opera is putting Apple's notoriously slow response time and browser monopoly on center stage today as part of its announcement that it is coming to the iPhone.

Opera Mini is already available for Symbian and Android and Mozilla has been working on apps for Android and Windows Mobile.

A primary difference between Opera and Safari is the browser's server-side rendering, which downloads a web page to a server and compresses it before sending it to the client, in this case your phone, for viewing. This method can reduce page load-times dramatically and could be even more important for mobile browsing than it is for web viewing at home.

The following sneak-peek video shows a full-featured, tabbed browser that certainly looks a lot faster than Apple's native Safari.

Even if we end up trying Opera Mini and decide to stick with Safari, in the end we feel it's always better to have options when it comes to software and platforms. But then again, that's not exactly what Apple is known for, is it?

Hopefully, Opera Mini will pass muster and it will be the beginning of the browser revolution for the iPhone - or, at very least, we'll have two browsers to choose from.

Don't miss the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7th in Mountain View, California! We're at a key point in the history of mobile computing right now - we hope you'll join us, and a group of the most innovative leaders in the mobile industry, to discuss it.

"Social networking remains one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web," said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile, in the company's press release. "Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile."

Just over 30% of smartphone users access social networking sites using a mobile browser, comScore reports, up from 22% just a year ago. Access to Facebook using a mobile browser grew 112% while Twitter grew a whopping 347%.

What do these numbers mean in terms of actual number of visitors? According to comScore, Facebook saw 25.1 million mobile users in January 2010, Myspace had 11.4 million and Twitter 4.7 million. As the report points out, "these figures do not include access of the social networking services by the nearly 6 million mobile phone owners who do so exclusively through mobile applications."

As smartphones continue to grow in popularity, social networking services will get more and more traffic from mobile use, and we wouldn't be surprised to see mobile access overtake other methods of access at some point in the future.

On his blog, Freitas writes, "We have successfully ported the native C Tor app to Android and built an Android application bundle that installs, runs and provides the glue needed to make it useful to end users.... secure, anonymous access to the web via Tor on Android is now a reality."

However, the developers who are currently preparing anonymous mobile browsing for its premiere are seeking volunteers for the app and for preparing the privacy-focused Android browser, Shadow. Interested parties should contact Freitas.

But is the mobile web really to blame here for the usability issues? Or is this just a matter of people trying to surf a web that has evolved beyond what traditional cell phones and their awful built-in browsers can handle?

According to the new study, available as of yesterday from the Nielsen Norman web site, the average success rate for performing various tasks on the mobile web was only 59%. Compare that to 80% for the same tasks when performed on a PC.

"Observing users suffer during our ... sessions reminded us of the very first usability studies we did with traditional websites in 1994," Nielsen told USA Today. "It was that bad."

Some of the tests involved in the study had participants heading to specific web sites, including Fandango.com for movie reviews and Anthropologie.com for a shopping task. Other tests were more general and open-ended, allowing users to do web searches to find the answers to various questions. As they surfed, participants came across sites that were both mobile-ready and those that were not.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that success rates dramatically improved when surfing the mobile versions of the web sites - by 20%, to be exact. Also not surprising was the fact that smartphone owners had less trouble performing the same tasks as users of traditional cell phones. For example, iPhone owners had an average success rate of 75% while other smartphones averaged 55%. Traditional cell phones, however, only averaged 38%.

Is the Mobile Web Unusable or is it the Devices People Use to Surf It?

The study calls into question the usability of today's mobile web, pointing out contributing factors to the problem which include things like small screens, awkward input on mini-keyboards, poorly designed sites, and bandwidth issues.

But the overall takeaway from this research feels like a case of putting hard numbers to information we already knew: surfing the web with your hot pink Razr's built-in browser is an experience that leaves a lot to be desired.

It is, in fact, the rise of the smartphone that has made the mobile web such a popular destination on both consumer devices and those designed for business use, like the Blackberry. Prior to what we can only call the "smartphone explosion," not much thought was given to the mobile web by users, web site owners, or by the handset manufacturers whose built-in browsers seemed to make the problem even worse in some cases. Data plans were an expensive luxury, too, so many people didn't even bother to add on the extra package that made mobile web surfing possible.

But when the smartphones took off, a movement in which Apple's iPhone has had a major impact, the mobile web felt the ripple effects of all the new users coming online. Not only were companies designing mobile sites, they were taking the time to design iPhone-specific sites, too. Although the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone in existence by any means, it has been a driving force of change for the smartphone industry as a whole. With its highly usable Safari web browser and touchscreen, other manufacturers had to step up their game in order to compete.

These days, every cell phone carrier offers multiple types of smartphones in their lineup from touchscreen Blackberrys to Android-powered phones to the iPhone and more. On these phones, the usability of the mobile web is not really an issue.

So what is this study really saying, then? If you want to surf the mobile web with ease, get a smartphone? Or perhaps it's pointing out how terrible the browsers are on traditional cell phones, seeing as how those who struggled the most were using what many would call "old school" handsets (aka "feature phones"). It's also interesting that no comparisons were made between the basic built-in browsers and a user-installed upgrade like Opera. With Opera Mini's site compression and zooming abilities, for example, accessing sites - both mobile and non - on any phone becomes much easier.

Ultimately, though, the market for feature phones may be on the decline, making usability issues such as the ones found in this study of less importance going forward. In March of this year for instance, IDC reported a decline in mobile phone shipments due to the poor economic conditions worldwide. What was really interesting, though, was that the smartphone segment of this market, while not unaffected, still remained in positive growth while the rest of the market was poised to expect an 8.3% downturn. As noted by the IDC report, that "speaks volumes about the potential upside for these devices when the market turns." What it means is that the market for feature phones is fading out. In the future, when every phone becomes a smartphone, the usability of the mobile web probably won't seem so bad.

According to a report from CNET, Mozilla is considering the possibilities. "I think our community would be interested in doing it, because Android will be appearing on more smartphones with the capabilities to provide a good browsing experience," said Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's vice president of mobile.

The only question now is whether or not Fennec will ever have a shot at becoming a popular mobile browser. Although development is moving along at a reasonable pace, it's certainly had its setbacks along the way...and it's nowhere near a version 1.0 yet. Meanwhile, WebKit is taking the lead when it comes to browsers on many of today's hottest smartphone platforms. The open-source WebKit code currently powers a lot of the newest browsers on the market including the one that ships on Android, iPhone's Safari browser, and the browser on the Palm Pre. Where does that leave Fennec? Apparently, it leaves it competing against Opera, which already has a solid foothold on the other mobile platforms lacking a decent mobile browser - Opera even became the top mobile browser recently.

Hopefully with the new NDK from Google, Fennec will be able to make its way onto at least one of the top smarthphone platforms out there. But we wonder: will anyone care when it arrives?

Good for Mobile Web Developers

Of course, these are benchmarks and don't necessarily correlate directly into a superior user experience, but it is good to see that even iPhone 3G users will see significant speed gains from the 3.0 release. This should give mobile developers quite a boost, as they can now develop and run more complex, cross-platform compatible web apps that won't be hindered by the mobile browser's performance, though the Android-powered G1 is still pretty slow according to Medialets and the Palm Pre sees the same performance as a 3G with the 3.0 OS.

For now, however, there are also still a few million iPhone 3G users who haven't updated their phones' operating system yet...