Once upon a time it would have been unheard of that a mobile phone browser could be used by 50 million unique users per month, but that’s exactly what Opera Mini has achieved.

Opera Mini is a mobile browser which can be downloaded to the majority of mobile devices and uses compression techniques to reduce a web page’s file size so that they load quickly onto the mobile device. This loads pages much quicker and also reduces mobile data costs.

Opera Mini is the lightweight mobile browser from Opera Software that can be easily downloaded on most handsets. The browser offers server-side compression, which shrinks Web pages by up to 90 percent before loading them on the device, speeding up the browsing experience and also saving users a substantial amount of money on their data usage bills.

In January this year, over 50 million unique users used Opera Mini and prove the popularity of Opera Mini to other mobile browsers. This compares to 50 million unique users per month in January 2009 and represents an impressive growth.

This becomes more impressive when you learn that these are not simply users who choose to download Opera Mini but are active users.

According to Gartner, Inc., by 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide. With the speedy rise in the number of people browsing the Web from their mobile phone, users are picking the best software to surf the real Web on their devices — and that’s where Opera Mini comes in.

That statistic also explains the exponential growth of Opera Mini in the last few months. To reach its first 10 million users, Opera Mini took 28 months from January 2006 to April 2008. However, the last 10 million has taken only three months from November 2009 to January 2010.