Software company Opera has developed a version of its flagship web browser to work with Android, the Google-backed open source mobile operating system. The company has released a technical preview of the software and says it is “inviting the Android development community to test the fresh build and share feedback with Opera for the forthcoming beta.”

According to the company, Opera Mini – the mobile variant of the company’s popular web-based browser – boasts 40 million users and is preloaded onto devices from eight different handset manufacturers. It offers web browsing from low-to-high resource handsets by compressing data at a remote server before sending content to the phone applet for rendering. Features include small screen rendering, zoom, synced bookmarks and integrated Google search.

The Android platform was first demonstrated running on various chipsets at this year’s Mobile World Congress two months ago. The platform will reportedly ship with its own browser but the Android developer community is free to work with any browser software made available.