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Opera reboots Live Scores feature in Opera Mini to provide in-depth football experience right in the browser

Published

2 years ago

April 4, 2023

Oslo, Norway – April 11th, 2023 – Opera – the company behind the family of popular mobile browsers that boast over 100 million monthly active users across Africa – is announcing an exciting new browser mode for football fans. The reboot will offer an in-depth football experience built right into the data-saving Opera Mini Browser, enabling fans to follow action from around the globe without having to download an additional application.

During the World Cup in 2022, Opera introduced Live Scores to the Opera Mini Browser, in which a scoreboard was installed right on the Opera Mini homepage so that fans did not have to jump to different sites to stay on top of the action – and thereby expend additional data. Now, Live Scores is set to receive a huge upgrade. No longer just a scoreboard, Live Scores 2.0 will provide a suite of features that will enable users to have the world of football at their fingertips, right from within Opera Mini.

To start, users will be able to customize their football experience by following their favorite teams and competitions. Over 8,000 teams will be available from around the world, including, of course, global favorites from the Premier League, Champions League, and beyond. Users can then track any game they like from a new Match List page. With a summary of kick-off times and live scores, users can follow multiple matches across numerous leagues at once.

And when fans want to know more about what’s going on in a particular match, they can now click to get a detailed picture of all the action. Users can toggle through the line-ups, read running commentary, and see match statistics to know who has scored, assisted, been booked, substituted – all the most pressing information, immediately available right in the Opera Mini Browser. Users can even join thousands of other fans in a running poll predicting what the result of the match will be.

A final feature of the rebooted Live Scores is Live Match Alerts, in which users can receive notifications for all matches involving their favorite teams. Additionally available for whichever matches that users just wants to follow (an edition of El Clásico, for example), the alerts will keep fans updated regarding kickoff times, goals, red cards, penalties, and the full-time result.

Opera has always been sensitive to what users want: what they love and enjoy. The company has long shared a passion for football with its users, and has brought football-focused products to the market such as the Apex Football app and website, which now has over 12M monthly users.

Moreover, Opera kicked off the recent World Cup with “Shake and Win,” the company’s popular contest that gave fans the chance to win prizes including airtime, cash, and brand-new phones. Opera users in Africa responded enthusiastically, with over 13 million participants from across the continent shaking their phones over 1,000,000 times a day. In all, winners collected more than 200,000 prizes as Opera Mini shot to #1 in the Google Play Store in both Nigeria and Kenya.

To experience a one-stop football experience, download Opera Mini for free from the Google Play Store.

About Opera

Opera is a global web innovator with an engaged and growing base of hundreds of millions of monthly active users who seek a better internet experience. Building on over 25 years of innovation that started with browser products, Opera is now leveraging its brand and highly engaged user base in order to expand its business into new segments. Today, Opera offers users around the world a range of products and services that include PC and mobile browsers, the newsreader Opera News, and apps dedicated to gaming, e-commerce, and classifieds. Opera is headquartered in Oslo, Norway, and listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange (OPRA).

About Opera Mini

Launched in 2006, Opera Mini is a small, fast, and powerful browser. It comes with unique features such as Data Compression, Offline File Sharing, and a built-in ad-blocker. Today, Opera Mini is used by more than 100 million people who chose it over the pre-installed browsers on Android mobile devices. Opera Mini has a 4.4 star rating on Google Play and has been reviewed by more than eight million people worldwide.

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ELECTING A POPE: THE BURDEN OF MAKING CHOICES

Published

5 days ago

May 11, 2025

The Gleamer

By Olubunmi Mayaki

“Habemus papam!” which in the English Language means, “We have a Pope.” was pronounced by Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, a French Catholic prelate, His Eminence, Cardinal Dominique Mamberti from the iconic loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican City on Thursday 8 May 2025 after white smoke billowed from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel. Those Latin words proclaimed to a tensed global audience the result of the election of a new Supreme Pontiff after the death of Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis) on 21 April 2025 at the age of 88 years.

The Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, Cardinal Robert Prevost (Pope Leo XIV) emerged as primus inter pares (first among equals) from the cardinals after undergoing detailed election rituals, which have been the process of selecting the head of the 2000-year-old Catholic Church for centuries.

A papal conclave, the process by which a new Pope is selected, was held consisting of one hundred and thirty-three (133) College of Cardinals, drawn from different parts of the world converged at St. Peter’s Basilica for a public mass before heading to the Sistine Chapel to cast their votes to elect the 267th Pope. During the mass, part of the choir renditions reminded voters to remember their last day when they would stand before God in judgment to render their stewardship on earth, which is to prevent them from rigging the voting process. At the behest of the senior cardinal deacon, voting formalities were read to the electors, which included- oath-taking- “I call as my witness Christ the Lord, who will be my judge, that my vote is given to the one whom I believe should be elected according to God”. Other processes are banning phones, jamming calls, forbidding speaking or contacting any of the candidates, voting rounds, spiritual pauses etc.

Looking at the voting process, one should be curious about how an election to pick a leader for a religious body could be so systematic and attract such global attention. It is a sharp contrast to elections where political leaders are chosen. Even in the so-called advanced democracies, we have seen electoral flaws and a dearth of political leaders. States are finding it difficult to pick genuine statesmen, giving rise to hegemonic leaders. These political imperia ums are emerging and stoking crises in their domain. Fallouts of elections are no longer favourable due to unpopular candidates forced on citizens.

Africa, as a case study, shows that no matter the rules put in place by the continent’s leaders, our election processes have been fraught with rigging, corruption and waste. In most cases, the leaders who set the rules are the violators of the same process. Governments conspire with electoral bodies to truncate election processes at will. Such political brigandage has destroyed the progress of the continent.

Closing this view, I hope that African leaders will take a cue from the Catholic Church’s election process to reinvigorate and rejig the continent’s faltering political process for the good of its people. Better still; political scholars from the continent can study the Catholic model. The common features of elections in most parts of Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, are riddled with vote rigging, violence, human rights abuse, repression, barbarism, crises, untold hardship, and sometimes, outright war. This is the bane of Africa’s development.

The burden of making good political choices should ordinarily rest on citizens. However, politicians have hijacked this process for selfish reasons. It has given birth to bad leaders. If we fail to get it right, what we see is what we get. That is the story of the world politics!

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