Web pages did load faster than Safari on my home wireless system. OWC Michael’s ReviewĪlthough I didn’t get to spend much time with this, I must say it is fast. If you absolutely must have a different browser, save yourself a painful browsing experience and choose anything but Opera mini. That isn’t enough to save Opera mini from a quick removal, though.įinal Verdict: Mobile Safari is probably still your best bet for Web browsing in iPhone OS. There was only one feature I liked, and that was the Speed Dial page, which could be useful if there were sites I visited frequently. While this is a “subjective” feel, there were points that it felt slower than the others over WiFi, especially when I stopped using their servers and connected directly to sites. Speed wasn’t as impressive as I was led to believe, either. Tapping a column of text zoomed in, making it readable, and the resultant layout was “okay,” but unless you’re just reading pages with straight hypertext, the experience is extremely disappointing, especially if there are images that go with the text. It seems like the folks at Opera took a columnar approach to displaying. See that picture of the iPad case? The text should be flowing around it. Opera, on the other hand, turned the text into illegible little squiggles, and simultaneously broke text wrapping around images. In every other browser I tested, the normal view of the page was resized properly to fit the screen, keeping layout intact while keeping text legible. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this browser. To paraphrase Roger Ebert’s review of North, I hated this browser. I figured that’d give a range of basic usability to judge things on. In order to compare them, I loaded a “test page” (the OWC Blog main page), tried to set it as my “home” page, and then opened a new tab to go to the OWC site. I tried about a half a dozen of them, including Opera, just so I could see how it stacked up to its “competition.” Most of these, however, seem to use the Safari/Webkit underpinnings available to devs, and just add tabs, “full screen” browsing, and other features. OWC Chris S’s Reviewīeing the offshoot of a more popular desktop browser, Opera mini may have made the biggest splash in the iPhone browser field, but it’s not the first “alternate” browser released. I cannot imagine many people would prefer this experience over Safari, and I think the Opera people were a little more than disingenuous with the quality of their app when they previewed it in a video a month ago. It’s free, but it leaves a bad aftertaste. Perhaps Mozilla will feel emboldened to make FireFox and we’ll have a real viable option to for those that don’t like Safari for whatever reason. Like the Millenium Falcon, Opera’s a fast “hunk of junk”, but unlike the rebel ship, this browser won’t be winning any wars. The only good thing I can report is that Opera was much faster at loading content (likely due to everything routing through Opera’s servers for recompression, no secure banking here). Where to start… it’s doesn’t render much accurately, navigating back and forth actually breaks page layouts, it knocks all the content around, can’t scroll without jittering, doesn’t resize fonts, and… well it does a lot of things wrong with “frustrating” being the best word to describe the app. This is definitely a “download, try, and delete” app. The Opera app is one giant piece of terrible. After using for a mere 5 minutes I can see why they did it. To the surprise of many, Apple approved the Opera Browser App for iPhone and iPod Touch. Bookmarks can be easily managed and accessed. Tabs allow for multitasking with several Web pages. An address field with auto-completion means you type less. Speed Dial gets you to your favorite Web sites with a single tap. Opera Mini is a breeze to use, and can synchronize data between your phone and computer. Use our powerful servers to compress data by up to 90% before sending it to your iPhone, so page-loads are lightning fast. Get a fast, cost-efficient Web browsing experience. We delayed our weekly Free App review by a day this week, in order to give ourselves some time to get to know Monday’s new release: Opera Mini Web browser.
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