With big news from Google Chrome and Firefox, the browser war has been anything but quiet lately. Norwegian browser Opera has also positioned its place in the war with several recent announcements. At SXSW, WebProNews caught up with Charles McCathieNevile, Opera’s Chief Standards Officer, to talk about the company’s recent efforts.

Mobile Web use is soaring on a global basis, at least if the newest data from Opera holds with respect to other browsers.  Opera reported today that page views and data consumption – along with sheer user numbers – are all increasing at a rapid pace.

There’s been a lot going on in web news over the last few days, and there have been some things worth looking at that I haven’t gotten a chance to cover, but I’d like to point out just in case you missed them. 

Opera has announced a non-exclusive agreement with the Telenor Group, aimed at stimulating growth of mobile Internet services across Telenor’s business units.

As part of the agreement, Opera and any of Telenor’s business units may develop a co-branded version of Opera Mini that is adapted to the local operator.

Opera has announced that its Opera Mini users viewed over a billion pages on July 25. On that day, every second, Opera Mini servers compressed over 11,500 pages before sending that content to phones around the world.

"Opera Mini has experienced tremendous page view growth in recent years," the company says. "In June 2008, Opera Mini servers processed 100 million page views per day for the first time. In June 2010, Opera Mini users viewed more than 910 million pages on average every day, an increase of more than 161% since June 2009."

Opera announced today that Opera Mini 5.1 is now available for Android devices. The company claims this is the most popular browser for mobile phones, and places an emphasis on its speed.

Opera has released its new State of the Mobile Web report. In the report, Opera finds that 8:00pm through 12:00am are the peak hours for mobile data consumption.

"Regardless of differences in economy, culture or location, those four evening hours account for a disproportionate amount of mobile data consumption," the company says.

Flock made headlines by releasing a new version of its social web browser on the Chromium platform today, placing a great deal of emphasis on speed. However, Opera has also released a new version of its browser with a similar emphasis.