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Opera Mini on the iPhone 4 is a pretty bad experience. Hope they get time to update it soon.

by dtf 16y ago

moxiemk1 16y ago
Indeed: the article claimed Opera mini made mobile Safari feel painful to use, which in my experience is patently false. It is only occasionally noticeably faster, and the rendering is far worse. Mobile Safari is great because it actually renders sites appropriately. Opera mini is great because it's faster than your built-in phone browser, but it doesn't compete with real browsers even when it's marginally faster.
- isani 16y ago
  Opera mini tends to jumble pages in unpredictable ways. The way it works is they transform the page into an intermediary format and transmit that to the phone. I don't think Opera has ever documented in depth what kinds of changes happen in the process.
Indyan 16y ago
Opera Mobile is the real mobile browser for smartphones. However, Opera can't develop O Mobile for iPhone due to App Store's TOS. Opera Mini can't handle modern websites using AJAX etc. because it can't render anything locally. It simply parses the data sent to it by the servers, which are responsible for rendering the website and compressing it. Also, the speed benefits are significant, only if you are on a slow connection.
- joshd 16y ago
  Opera Mini stores the page state on their servers. If you click on a JS link then the Opera Mini client treats it like a new page load, but the server is just executing the JS and resending the page.
stcredzero 16y ago
Opera Mini on the iPhone 4 is a pretty bad experience. What they say about the economics of mobile bandwidth and computing power vs. server bandwidth/CPU rings true, however. The trick would be to optimize the rendering for specific mobile browsers. One could even use the "native" rendering engine to do this. Apple should implement this trick for mobile Safari, optimized for the specific screen sizes of the various iDevices. Not only would this save rendering time and battery power on those devices, it would enable yet another advertising strategy for them.
masklinn 16y ago
Opera Mini is a terrible experience on the iPhone in general. They apparently never expected it to be accepted and pushed a quick (and bad) port of the Android version. Probably wary of bad publicity (for once) Apple accepted the application… and since then Opera barely touched it. No update to the non-standard look&feel, no update to the non-standard settings management (and widgets), no update to the awful zoom… and apparently barely useable on the iPhone 4… And since they have't done any update to it since May while they released 5.1 for just about every other smartphone, I'm not exactly expecting anything.

Opera Mini on the iPhone 4 is a pretty bad experience. Hope they get time to update it soon.

by dtf 16y ago

Opera Mini on the iPhone 4 is a pretty bad experience. Hope they get time to update it soon.

Indeed: the article claimed Opera mini made mobile Safari feel painful to use, which in my experience is patently false. It is only occasionally noticeably faster, and the rendering is far worse. Mobile Safari is great because it actually renders sites appropriately. Opera mini is great because it's faster than your built-in phone browser, but it doesn't compete with real browsers even when it's marginally faster.

isani 16y ago
Opera mini tends to jumble pages in unpredictable ways. The way it works is they transform the page into an intermediary format and transmit that to the phone. I don't think Opera has ever documented in depth what kinds of changes happen in the process.

Indyan 16y ago

Opera Mobile is the real mobile browser for smartphones. However, Opera can't develop O Mobile for iPhone due to App Store's TOS. Opera Mini can't handle modern websites using AJAX etc. because it can't render anything locally. It simply parses the data sent to it by the servers, which are responsible for rendering the website and compressing it. Also, the speed benefits are significant, only if you are on a slow connection.

joshd 16y ago
Opera Mini stores the page state on their servers. If you click on a JS link then the Opera Mini client treats it like a new page load, but the server is just executing the JS and resending the page.

stcredzero 16y ago

Opera Mini on the iPhone 4 is a pretty bad experience. What they say about the economics of mobile bandwidth and computing power vs. server bandwidth/CPU rings true, however. The trick would be to optimize the rendering for specific mobile browsers. One could even use the "native" rendering engine to do this. Apple should implement this trick for mobile Safari, optimized for the specific screen sizes of the various iDevices. Not only would this save rendering time and battery power on those devices, it would enable yet another advertising strategy for them.

masklinn 16y ago

Opera Mini is a terrible experience on the iPhone in general. They apparently never expected it to be accepted and pushed a quick (and bad) port of the Android version. Probably wary of bad publicity (for once) Apple accepted the application… and since then Opera barely touched it. No update to the non-standard look&feel, no update to the non-standard settings management (and widgets), no update to the awful zoom… and apparently barely useable on the iPhone 4… And since they have't done any update to it since May while they released 5.1 for just about every other smartphone, I'm not exactly expecting anything.