[Update: our fellow iPhone fans over at Macgasm have made a good comparison video of Safari and Opera Mini. Opera’s definitely faster in that test and seems to handle sites like the NYtimes quite well, but the fact that site supporti so erratic (IGN.com looks terrible) still makes Safari the clear winner for all types of browsing for me — for now]
Overall, Opera Mini sounds like a bigger deal than it actually is. Yes, yes, it was a bit of a long and treacherous road to the App Store (although John Gruber didn’t think so), but how does the free proxy-based browser actually compare to Safari Mobile on the iPhone? Rather poorly.
Opera Mini was unable to load any mobile versions of the sites I regularly visit (JAiB, Gear Diary, etc.) and even full desktop versions of sites were formatted very strangely. While I may have been willing (and even impressed) by the speedy load times a couple of years ago on my Windows Mobile smartphone, the iPhone version of Opera just doesn’t cut it, and doesn’t seem much faster than Safari after this first afternoon of browsing.
Where is my Internet?!
One of the ridiculous things about the browser is that it’s still a mobile browser, so websites keep throwing up these iPhone or mobile-based themes that simply dont’ work properly on Opera Mini. I know these sites load up correctly on other platforms (I’ve used Opera on the Android platform for a few minutes – it worked just fine), so I’m guessing this is simply a 1.0 release bug. Unfortunately, browsing happens to be the reason you’ll download Opera Mini. I don’t consider this complaint to be the “oh, I wish it supported OTA syncing and these 10,000 other features” whining of a tech blogger, but rather, a great big problem with this 1.0 release (so much so that I have to think of what sites to load, instead of just browsing and enjoying). You can load up the desktop versions of certain sites, but I had to do this every single time I visited them, since the settings weren’t saved.
Opera does work correctly on some sites, but it’s hard to tell which, until you try them. My experience with the ShawnBlanc.net (an all-around great blog) was good, and all of his various posts loaded up correctly, with scrolling and text zooming working blazingly fast. One touch I thought I liked was how all the text is resized and auto-formatted as I zoomed in, but this turned out to be an “all or nothing” zoom — you either view magnified text, or you view the website as a whole — with nothing in between. It really only worked well for blog posts, but failed miserably for charts and tables.
I could go on…
I could probably continue writing about all the ways that Opera Mini hasn’t been working for me, but I’d like to give it the benefit of the doubt. I’m hoping that some sort of hot fix comes out in the next few days to make the browser more viable — especially as something to use when only EDGE is available. There are advantages to how Opera Mini works, and foremost among them the fact that data is compressed by up to 90 percent. IGN.com actually loaded up in about 15 seconds over EDGE — it’s just a pity that it, along with many other sites I like visiting, looks horrible in Opera Mini.
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TAGS: web browser
