Opera Mini 4 Beta
Opera Software recently unleashed Opera Mini 4 Beta with positive feedback from testers; the mobile browser is quite good, not to mention blazingly fast. I tried it out with my trusty Nokia E61 and here’s how it looked like on first run with the BBC News website:
The first notable change with Opera 4 Mini Beta is having the website rendered in full view, similar to how the Symbian S60 3rd edition web browser, but fits everything in the screen first and offers a user to zoom in to any part of the screen to be able to read the contents or click on links. I’ve seen this feature with other Opera Software products, like the Nintendo DS Browser and the Wii Internet Channel.
The current version of Opera Mini (3.1) doesn’t render the page like this. Instead, it defaults to Opera’s “Small Screen Rendering” (SSR) technology which formats a whole webpage to fit into a mobile phone’s screen. Because of this transformation, the user will have to scroll down through the website to view the contents. This “sacrifice” is justified due to the constraints of the the screen and its actually a good way to test your webpages if they are formatted properly for mobile devices. SSR is a good thing since you don’t have to make a mobile version of your website. In Opera Mini 4 Beta, you can still use SSR by selecting “Fit to Width” in the browser settings:
Reloading the BBC website to check SSR will result to this:
To be able to render webpages fast, Opera Mini 4 Beta uses a proxy (either socks or http) to transcode pages and images resulting to optimized viewing for the mobile device. There are times though that transcoding fails, which may result to the following error report:
The only time I experienced transcode errors were for websites that had complex table layouts, but these pages did work in Opera Mini 3.1. It’s quite possible that the proxy for the beta is different to that of the current release, so I guess this is worthy of a bug report to the Opera Mini team which can be done in the browser (quite nifty even).
Because Opera 4 Mini Beta is a mobile web browser, don’t expect it to perform like a desktop browser. But in the mobile space, it’s pretty obvious that Opera Mini is the best mobile web browser out there, spanning to almost all mobile phone brands. The Symbian S60 3rd Ed browser comes in close second (but loses anyway because you need a full firmware update to upgrade it while Opera Mini just needs a download). The application is lightweight and it’s very easy to use. If your mobile phone has 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity, do yourself a favor and get it.
I also noticed that Opera Software is becoming the dominant player in the mobile/embedded space on providing web browser software. My Sharp Zaurus, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, 2 Nokia and 1 Alcatel mobile phones all have Opera browsers installed. In a trip to France, the airline I flew with offered in-flight web browsing (although quite expensive) and powered by Opera. I guess you get the idea.
If the mobile web experience is this good and for free, who needs an iPhone?
Jerome, The webpages on Opera Mini are first processed and formatted for your phone’s small screen on the Opera Mini servers. And since Opera Mini 4 beta is a complete rewrite of Opera Mini 3, different servers are used in the back-end, which means you’ll sometimes get errors in only either one of them.
I like your point about Opera being everywhere, specifically you mention on the mobile and embedded space. Don’t forget the desktop too. Although we’re still relatively small in the desktop market, we’ve been seeing a constant growth over the past couple years.
Daniel
Opera Software
Hi Daniel thanks for the comment! Yes I did skip the desktop part on purpose and wanted to highlight Opera’s strength in mobile/embedded. I am an Opera user on the browser as well, but for most casual users, the Opera brand is relatively unknown from the start, only because it is not bundled in the OS (Vista ships IE7, Ubuntu and the rest of the GNU/Linux systems out there include Firefox branded and otherwise). I don’t know any PC hardware OEM manufacturer that bundles Opera by default, but its a different story on web-enabled devices and appliances.
Being an Opera user in Linux, I like the fact that it renders pages and fonts almost exactly the same as that on Windows, FreeBSD and Solaris. What I do not like about it though, is that certain plugins are either hard to install for the user or does not exist at all. I do understand the fact that Opera is perhaps the closest you can get for a full standards-compliant web browser, but its a shame that web developers/designers and other people involved in the profession consider Opera as the third or even fourth choice for browser testing (IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera come to mind).
Nevertheless, I’m still pretty much an Opera user and its one of the first things I install when I have a new laptop or helping a family member or friend use the web to its full potential.
how can i browse with opera mini free in my engage phone