Posts tagged Review
by Ben Lopez
Opera Mini made a nice splash in tech blogs, and as a top trend on Twitter when it launched in April. I thought it was a little buggy, but performed well overall. After allowing some time for an update (and it has been updated), I sat down for some serious Opera time to deliver an in-depth review.
My initial impressions are that it’s not a bad browser. The interface is very nice, and in fact I preferred it slightly to Safari’s. For instance, it’s nice to have a reload button in the fixed dock, so I don’t have to scroll to the top to reload as in Safari. Tabbed browsing appears a bit wonky at first with the shuffle animation that is used, but it’s very solid.
Another nice feature is a clean, simple home screen that imitates the desktop version of Safari’s “Top Sites” screen as a spot for favourites. This is strangely absent on Safari.
Speed Tests: I tried a variety of sites for speed tests, with fairly consistent results. Opera was almost always faster, though not even close to their “up to 6x faster broswing” claim. Six times faster than what? Here are two basic examples to give you an idea of the speed comparison:
-Graphics-heavy webite (ncsx.com): Safari: 11.08 seconds, OM 7.69 seconds
-Light-graphics website (twitter.com): Safari: 7.18 seconds, OM 6.83 seconds
So good interface, good speed, but the browsing falls just a little short. The biggest problem here is that there’s no control over how far you can zoom in, it is entirely automatic. So essentially any other site that is not in neat columns become very cumbersome to navigate due to this. Clicking links is also strangely spotty, and does not always proceed to load the page. Other small annoyances include defaulting to load the “mobile” version of many sites, not the “touch” or full versions, and occasionally not resizing to fit the screen.
While it holds a sleek interface and is quite speedy, there’s no substitution for elegant navigation. If they can tweak the touch sensitivity and give us more control over our zoom, I certainly think it can hold it’s own. But for the time being, stick with Safari.
GRADE: C-
