Does Opera Mini represent the future of mobile browsing? I don't know for sure but I do believe it is the best mobile browser for most users right now. As most of you probably know, Opera Mini, or Mini for short, is a free Java ME application that can run on most current and many older phones. Mini is a small (100KB) application that implements a full html web browser that rivals and in many cases exceeds the performance of the best Smartphone Browsers like Opera's own Opera Mobile, Access' NetFront V3.4, Microsoft's Pocket Internet Explorer (PIE) and Nokia's new Series 60 V3 Browser.
How is it possible that a 100KB Java application running on the low-end processors of mainstream phones can rival the performance of native code applications running on the fastest mobile processors available? Two words, proxy server. Mini talks to the Internet through a very sophisticated proxy provided by Opera. The proxy does all the heavy lifting - parsing tag soup, re-flowing pages, resizing images and interpreting Javascript. What gets sent to Mini after the proxy has done it's magic is a compressed binary that requires relatively little processing power to render on the handset. This means that web pages, especially large complex pages with many images, load and render much faster than they would using the phone's built-in browser. Actually, built-in phone browsers can't even display pages above a certain size. typically between 30 and 100 KB of combined markup and images. Mini, thanks to the proxy, which splits large pages up into multiple smaller pages, can display virtually any web page regardless of size.
The subject of viewing PC web pages on mobile phones is a somewhat controversial one among mobile web proponents and developers. The controversy boils down to whether we should be developing specific web sites optimized for mobile browsers (the "mobile web" camp) or should be striving toward "one web" accessible by any device? I'm a member of the mobile web camp, as least for the time being, because existing mobile browsers don't provide a pleasant or even in most cases a usable experience when visiting the majority of non-mobile specific web sites. The "one web" proponents argue that with careful standards based web design combined with better mobile browsers it is possible to produce web pages usable on any device. I agree that it is possible, but doing so produces a site that doesn't fully exploit the strengths of either the mobile or PC browser platform. You wind up with a page that is either unwieldy on the mobile or uninteresting on the PC. I still believe this, but I recognize that the PC Web is currently 100 times as big as the mobile web. There's a lot of information out there on the "big" web that I'd love to access on my phone but simply can't because of limitations such as screen size, limited browser image and page size capacity and the unavailability of technologies like Javascript. I do feel that mobile specific sites tend to be the most usable on mobile devices, but also admit that having a capable full web browser on my phone is a very good thing when I want to get at something which can only be found on the PC web. Opera Mini goes a long way toward making the full web usable on phones. The proxy implements some rather intelligent reformatting and re-flowing and resource constraints are reduced or eliminated thanks to the proxy's compression. For an example of how one might use Mini to browse a full web site, take a look at the first three images which depict Howard Forums (HF) the biggest North American Phone Fan site. HF has a pretty good mobile site but it's lacking two features of PC site that I miss, search and the tracking of which posts you've read - allowing you to go to the first unread post in a thread with one click. The HF home page is 185KB including about 50 images and my phone's built in browser won't load it at all. In Opera Mini the HF home page comes up quickly and is usable but requires an excessive amount of scrolling to get to the forum I want - HF has a LOT of forums all in a long list on the front page. Once I enter a forum however I find it very usable and I can search and best of all, threads with unread messages appear in bold and when I click the down pointing arrow icon in front of a post title I'm taken to the first unread post in the thread - a function which requires Javascript, BTW. I've bookmarked my favorite forums and now I always use Mini when I visit HF on my phone.
But it gets even better, Mini is a better browser even for mobile sites. Many so called "mobile" sites are really designed for the big screens, lots of memory and fast CPUs of Smartphones and PDA's. Viewing such sites on a feature phone's browser is frustrating with slow
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posted by Dennis Bournique
August 2, 2006 @ 8:18 pm
7 View Comments
