Small Gotcha with the New Mini Beta

 Opera mini Beta Two History PageOpera Mini is the best mobile browser – period. I’ve been using it daily for a year and a half. Even comparing Mini with smartphone browsers like Netfront, Webkit or Opera Mobile, I prefer Mini. It loads pages faster on a slow connection, renders images quickly and beautifully and has an extremely well thought out user interface,

Opera released a second beta of the next generation of Opera Mini last week. It launched two new features; custom search and landscape mode and also contains many bugs fixes. See my review for more details.

However, I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t use the new beta. The issue is the cache problem that I mentioned in the review. I thought that I’d fixed it by reinstalling but after four reinstalls it’s now obvious that the problem is still there. The cache in the new beta tops out at 60 KB on my phone. That may sound like a lot but it’s nothing compared to the seemingly bottomless cache of all prior versions of Opera Mini. In any other version of Mini it’s normal to have multiple large pages totalling hundreds of KB in the cache.

The screen shots tell the story. They show Opera Mini’s history page in the Sony Ericsson Java SDK’s emulator after running a simple test. The test consisted of starting at the home page of the desktop version of this blog, pc.wapreview.com, and following the previous entries link 11 times . The first image shows Beta Two. The single bold entry is cached, the others aren’t.The second image shows Beta One with all 11 pages cached. Each page is about 50 KB so Beta One cached about 600 KB and Beta Two only 50!Opera Mini Beta One History Page

It’s not just an academic issue either. The off-line browsing trick I wrote about doesn’t work without a big cache. My favorite site, Bloglines Mobile, is essentially broken in Beta 2. Suppose you load a Bloglines page with say 30 posts, about 100 KB worth, and after reading a few posts you click on an interesting link in one of the posts. When you hit the back key, the page isn’t in the cache anymore and Opera has to reload the page. On most sites this just means a delay while the page is fetched. But because of the way Bloglines works posts are marked as read when they are first loaded. Bloglines Mobile only displays unread posts. When the page reloads all the posts are gone because they have been marked as read. This was never a problem with any earlier version of Mini because the Bloglines page was still in the cache.

I hope I don’t sound too critical of Opera Mini. I love that program and will continue to use the older versions. I’ve filed a bug report and am I’m hoping the cache problem will be fixed in the next release – I really want to use all the new features, but not if it means giving up off-line browsing and Bloglines.

The cache problem may not occur with all phones, though the fact that it happens with the Sony Ericsson emulator is not a good sign. If you’re trying Beta 2 and running into cache problems, the solution is simple. Go back to version 3.1, it’s doesn’t do landscape or desktop view but it’s fast and stable and you won’t run out of cache. Download it from operamini.com with you phone’s built-in browser.

14 thoughts on “Small Gotcha with the New Mini Beta

  1. Not able to open yahoo id. After filling email id and password page become blank.pls help

  2. I have a problem for my Nokia 6300.
    “Only 70 sets are alowed” is showing in my mobile while I am going to save a new web setting. How can I solve this?

  3. Hi, everyone’s. I have a question for my nokia 6300. Why if i want to instlalling opera mini 4.1 it’s always connecting failled? But if i use opera mini 3.1.2 it’s work? I wish you have a solution. Thank’s

  4. A lot of people seem to be having trouble with Java apps on the Nokia 6300. I don’t have the phone and I don’t know the answer.

    In general you need to define an access point that allows direct connections to the net and assign that access point to Java applications. It’s impossible to be specific because every operator requires different settings and the phones vary a lot even from the same manufacturer. Have you asked your operator or the shop you bought the phone from for help?

    I did see the following in the Opera Mini forum.

    “Hi,

    Please follow the below mentioned steps to work on Opera mini 4.0 on Nokia 6300

    1. Open “Settings” on your mobile.
    2. Select “Configuration” in the settings.
    3. Open “Defaul confi.sett.” and select the configuration file and make it as default.
    4. Open Activ. def, in all your applications and click on “Yes” to make the selected configuration as a default for all applications.

    Regards,
    Jothi Mani Rajendran.”

    The best places on the net to get help on settings are the user forums. Try the Opera Mini Forum,
    http://my.opera.com/community/forums/forum.dml?id=111 Also, http://howardforums.com and http://www.esato.com/board/

  5. I am able 2 use my web properly in my nokia 6300 bt the applications lyk opera,yahoo go,etc are showin connection errors..y is it so? I hav alowed internet acess in setings.. :( plz help me out.. Im usin wap.

  6. Hi,i have the same problen.i have a nokia 6300.mig 33.morange.opera mini.and all othr java applications wont work.bt da web is working.bt cant log in with an application.any ideas?

  7. Can sum1 pls give me the email settings 4 my Nokia 6300? I’m on the MTN network (South Africa). I’ve tried everything incl having configuration settings sent 2 my ph. What i’d really like is step by step instructions. Thanx!!

  8. Tim,

    Try Beta 1 (it’s on the Downloads page) That’s what I use and I haven’t had to re-login to Bloglines in a couple of weeks.

    Also, the last time I had login problems (I think it was in July) deleting and re-installing Opera fixed them. I have a theory that the Opera servers lose whatever it is that they use to identify a handset and associate cookies with it. Reinstalling Opera seems to force a re-bonding and get cookies working again. You have to re-entering all your bookmarks though.

    Dennis

  9. my problem is bloglines doesnt work at all in beta 2. when i click a feed, it asks me to log in again. opera 3 works fine.

  10. I have no idea why it’s not working, Helloct. But if all your Java apps stopped working at once and you didn’t change any settings it’s almost surely something your mobile provider did. Try calling them. You will generally need to escalate to tier 2 or higher support. It helps one of the applications that isn’t working is one you purchased from your carrier.

    If that doesn’t help your best resources are:

    1) The official Opera Mini Forum http://my.opera.com/community/forums/forum.dml?id=111

    2) If you are in the US or Canada, Howard Forums http://howardforums.com
    Post in the forum for your carrier (ATT, Sprint, etc) or in the LG forum. If you aren’t in the US, try Esato, http://esato.com or Google “mobile phone forum”

    When posting to any forum give as much information as possible including, make and model of phone, carrier, country, the name and price of your data plan and the exact text of any error messages.

  11. Hello. I’ve a fast internet connection on my phone (LG U8330) , i can download opera mini but it can’t connecte to internet (like all other java app mig33, movamessenger, im-seven… ). They all worked before but now, only the initiale phone browser can connect to internet. And It’s hard to with this initiale phone browser when you used to browser with om (so cool) . I’m waiting any suggestion. Thank.

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