Episode 129: Opera Mini Web Browser for the iPhone & iPod Touch [Discussion]

[marilee]

Looking for an alternate to your iPhone's Safari web browser? Stephanie Chu shows you the newly released, FREE Opera Mini Web browser, which seems anything but mini!

Watch or download this episode now! (http://revision3.com/appjudgment/ip_steph_opera)

[masterq]

I definitely agree that opera is much faster on edge due to their pre-compression technique, but I thought the browser was severely lacking in almost every other area. They seemed to have completely ignored apple's human interface guidelines as to how an iPhone app should look and feel, making it very awkward to use.

It also appears as though they ignored all the iPhone SDK interface elements and replaced them with their own homemade elements. This is not a big deal for something like the settings where they made their own checkboxes instead of using the familiar on/off switch, but its horrible for things like the browser window itself. They didn't use the UIScrollView to contain the pages which makes scrolling around very stiff and unresponsive. You also don't get the nice overscroll springback effect when you try to scroll past the edge of a page. They even went so far as to draw their own scrollbars (I can tell because they just disappear instead of fading away like normal scrollbars). Zooming is HORRIBLE. You can pinch to zoom, but there are only two levels of zoom - all the way out and all the way in. The zoomed out version of pages looks horrendous with completely non-legible text and badly scaled images. Zooming in to a block level element in safari is very useful, especially when reading blog posts and other articles. This is a huge problem IMO.

Overall, I have to say safari is far superior even though it may not appear that way on the surface. The best way to describe it is that it feels like an android app instead of an iPhone app. If I'm stuck on EDGE and I need some nice speed I may use this, but until they do some serious work on the user interface and rendering engine I'm sticking with safari.

[marilee]

All valid points! Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I do agree with you on the fact that they've strayed from Apple's human interface guidelines - it's a bit distracting. I do enjoy the other features Opera offers, though (i.e. speed dial, offline viewing, tabbed interface) and think it's nice to have an option, even if it's not used 100% of the time. :)

I definitely agree that opera is much faster on edge due to their pre-compression technique, but I thought the browser was severely lacking in almost every other area. They seemed to have completely ignored apple's human interface guidelines as to how an iPhone app should look and feel, making it very awkward to use.

It also appears as though they ignored all the iPhone SDK interface elements and replaced them with their own homemade elements. This is not a big deal for something like the settings where they made their own checkboxes instead of using the familiar on/off switch, but its horrible for things like the browser window itself. They didn't use the UIScrollView to contain the pages which makes scrolling around very stiff and unresponsive. You also don't get the nice overscroll springback effect when you try to scroll past the edge of a page. They even went so far as to draw their own scrollbars (I can tell because they just disappear instead of fading away like normal scrollbars). Zooming is HORRIBLE. You can pinch to zoom, but there are only two levels of zoom - all the way out and all the way in. The zoomed out version of pages looks horrendous with completely non-legible text and badly scaled images. Zooming in to a block level element in safari is very useful, especially when reading blog posts and other articles. This is a huge problem IMO.

Overall, I have to say safari is far superior even though it may not appear that way on the surface. The best way to describe it is that it feels like an android app instead of an iPhone app. If I'm stuck on EDGE and I need some nice speed I may use this, but until they do some serious work on the user interface and rendering engine I'm sticking with safari.

[masterq]

All valid points! Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I do agree with you on the fact that they've strayed from Apple's human interface guidelines - it's a bit distracting. I do enjoy the other features Opera offers, though (i.e. speed dial, offline viewing, tabbed interface) and think it's nice to have an option, even if it's not used 100% of the time. :)

The new features are definitely a plus. I'm still unsure about the tabs vs safari's page-style view, but I do like the speed dial. It's still early though. If opera fixes some of the more obvious problems it will definitely give safari a run for its money and force apple to keep up. Competition is always good for us.

[omikron]

I like the tabs much better than the page view in safari. Safari always ends up reloading the page if you have it docked for more than 2 minutes, with opera it was instantaneous. What about the back and forward buttons, it actually works like a real browser. When you press the back arrow, the previous page pops in almost instantly just like a desktop browser whereas safari always has to reload the page. The scrolling is not as smooth but I think thats part of the reason it renders the pages so fast. Text on a full pc site is illegible until you zoom in to it. It seems like opera loads up the least amount of data it can while still maintaining the page elements. I love how I can scroll down the entire page without having that 3 second loading time where all you can see is a checkerboard like in safari.

[taulmarill]

Am I the only one, who is worried that opera routes all traffic over their own servers? Call me paranoid, but a company that puts out a web browser that defaults to their own man-in-the-middle infrastructure worries me. I'll just stay away from this one.