15 Apr 2010, Posted by mikefoong in the category, 1 Comments

First impressions of Opera Mini for the iPhone

So in a surprising move, Apple open it’s gates to allow another browser or a competitive browser to surface as an app on the iPhone. I am sure Apple made a calculative move before swinging it’s doors on it’s hinges. Nonetheless the competition is welcomed.

Why would you need another browser?

For the simple fact that there is currently no “incognito” or “private” mode on the current mobile safari. Now I don’t mean that it functions like that but it helps when you have multiple emails on the same provider or you want to browse to sites that has lots of cookies and leaves all kind of junk on your browser history or cache. You can use either browser as your main browser but keep one of them clean everytime you finish browsing. You can also launch one yahoo account on one browser and the other email account on the other browser without signing out of the first one. Which for someone like me is quite troublesome.

So what is it like compared to safari.

Here are my first impressions:
1. Opera loads very fast due to backend caching on the server side.
2. Opera loads on the background while in tab mode.
3. Fast tab switching. No refresh when you are using 2 or 3 tabs.
4. Tune down the graphics for better performance.
5. In browser search

That is as much as I can say about the opera browser:

1. It does not always render well especially on blogs or sites that are heavy in graphics and long text that are not aligned well.

2. Sites with lots of pictures tends to load slower unless you tune down the picture quality in the settings.

3. It does not recognize iPhone modes. Some features of browsing to an iPhone optimized site are missing. E.g. Yahoo’s mobile site. Go to http://m.yahoo.com and the horizontal in browser scrolling feature is somehow turned off. I am not sure If it is not using webkit for the cache rendering or they are not privy to Apple’s internal API. In which case Opera is locked out. This applies to m.google.com

Overall experience
If you want to browse websites real fast for it’s content, the Opera would be a great companion. If you have to log in to multiple accounts from a single service provider like google or yahoo, you can use Opera as an incognito browser. Otherwise day to day browsing, I still prefer safari as a friend told me last night, some sites just looks wrong because it’s one pixel off. The way a mobile web browser render should work well for the device and create a great browsing experience for the user and it’s currently not doing it for me now. It feels like I have to compromise something to use Opera.

Full Screen Render

Double Tapping does not resize the picture to the screen size, it spills over and the user needs to scroll to the side to see a full view of zoom out.

For some reason Google Mobile Reader for the iPhone is not viewable via Opera, this hampers my Google Reader reading, and keeping track of news items i like of store for later reading.

Yahoo Mobile for the iPhone has a horizontal scroll for sub news or second level news items. On Opera, the scrolling is disabled. Compare that to Mobile Safari below, you can scroll the sub news items. This are examples of sites that are optimised for touch based phones and the iPhone that Opera could not support well at the moment.