Tag Archives: Browsers

Son Of The Engadget Demobilizer – A New Bookmarklet To View Engadget’s Desktop Version In Opera Mini

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Engadget - Ugly new mobile view in Opera Mini

One of my favorite tech news sites, engadget.com, recently started forcing Opera Mini users to a new mobile version of the site that looks like it was designed for legacy dumb phone browsers (image, left). I could live with the boring plain text on a white background, but not with the severely degraded and distorted images. But the worst part of the new design is the pagination, which breaks most articles into multiple tiny pages. Even on dumbphones, Opera Mini can load … Continue reading →

Blogger Mobile Templates Now Support Opera Mini, Symbian Anna, N9 and BlackBerry OS 6.0

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Prepaid Phone News Mobile

I covered Google Blogger’s Beta mobile page templates in depth when they were rolled out last January.  They work well and look great and go a long way toward making the often unruly Blogger sites usable with a mobile browser.  At that time I lamented that the only iPhones and bada and Android devices were detected and served the mobile formatted pages. You can force Blogger to use the mobile template by appending ?m=1 to the end of the URL of any page … Continue reading →

Opera Mini, Bolt and UC Browser On Bada Phones!

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Samsung’s Dolfin browser on the Wave bada phone is a good one  in most respects. It loads pages quickly,  has excellent JavaScript performance and supports geo-location and many HTML5 features. But I found it unusable with many desktop sites because the fonts are too small to read at the zoom level where text columns fit the screen. When you zoom in text doesn’t reflow and you have to scroll horizontally to read which I find intolerable. Thanks to a reader … Continue reading →

Use Google Buzz In Opera Mini, Bolt, MicroB and Firefox Mobile!

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Google’s Buzz has certainly generated a lot of negative reactions around the web over privacy issues and the fact that many Android users were denied access to it. Google has been in damage control mode ever since the Buzz launch and has made some changes that go a long way to answering both criticisms. The privacy issue was obviously the more serious.  A lot of  Gmail users felt that their privacy had been violated by Buzz’s auto-follow feature that defaulted … Continue reading →

Why Do Mobile Web Designers Ignore Opera Mini?

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There’s a lot of buzz these days about how “touch web” browsers, especially the iPhone’s Safari, but also the WebKit based browsers on Android, Palm WebOS  and recent Symbian devices are  revolutionizing mobile browsing.  It’s certainly true, especially in the US and other developed countries, that advanced smartphones with powerful “full-web” browsers have opened a lot of eyes to the fact that using the Web on mobile phones is not only practical but fun and useful. But not everyone can … Continue reading →

Opera Mini 5 Beta 2 – Does Progressive Loading Speed Up Browsing?

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Following up on yesterday’s release of new Opera Mini Beta, the official Opera Mini Blog published a short list of the main enhancements in Beta 2. It includes an explanation of the new “Progressive Loading” feature in this release. According to Opera, “your browsing experience will be faster and better” with progressive loading because pages are loaded in chunks allowing the page to start displaying sooner.  I was surprised because I hadn’t noticed that Beta 2 was any faster than … Continue reading →

Coming very soon: The next generation in mobile browsing

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The  words “Coming very soon: The next generation in mobile browsing” and a map jigsaw puzzle image appeared on Opera Software’s “teaser” page at opera.com/next/. Opera used a similar page during the PR buildup leading to the release of Opera Unite. Five days before Unite’s release, Opera posted a page reading “On June 16th at 9 AM (CET) we will reinvent the Web” If Opera follows the same model this time we should expect something new in mobile browsing five … Continue reading →

iPhone iGoogle Now Works in Skyfire, Opera Mini, S60 Webkit

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When I covered Google’s resurrected IGoogle for the iPhone, I complained that Google’s overly aggressive browser detection and redirection  was blocking users of other advanced mobile browsers like S60 Webkit and Opera Mini from the site. Today, I noticed that Google seems to have made a subtle change to the way it handles unrecognized and unsupported browsers. It’s now possible to force the advanced mobile version to be delivered to any browser.  Visit google.com/m/ig?uipref=6 to try it. You need to … Continue reading →