Opera 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,<\/p>\n
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<\/a> for more details.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>, and following the previous entries link<\/em> 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!<\/p>\n
It’s not just an academic issue either. The off-line browsing trick I wrote about<\/a> doesn’t work without a big cache. My favorite site, Bloglines Mobile<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> with you phone’s built-in browser.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Opera 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 … Continue reading