Today Opera Software announced that it’s laying the groundwork to get its widgets platform onto its Android browsers. In lieu of extensions as employed by Mozilla Firefox, Opera uses widgets, small applications that run within the browser to perform tasks like showing the weather or a calculator.
From the development perspective, Opera’s release of a widget runtime lets developers start creating these widgets for Android phones. It’s alpha software, so consumers shouldn’t start looking for these widgets yet.
Opera’s widget runtime for Android uses a mobile application specification put forth by the WAC (Wholesale Applications Community), an alliance of carriers and cell phone manufacturers like Verizon and Samsung. Opera claims it’s the first to use the WAC spec for this runtime purpose.
Read more on Opera’s blog.