Opera Mini on iPhone: Missed opportunity

I’ve now had a proper play with Opera Mini on the iPhone and I don’t think it’s as good as anyone was expecting. Some of the problems are faults with Opera itself, other problems are presumably due to limitations of the iPhone. Overall it’s unlikely to pull people away from Safari.

Firstly, a correction. I said earlier that you can’t double-tap to zoom out after you’ve zoomed in. Actually you can do this, but it only works some of the time. In a way, the randomness is worse than if double-tapping didn’t work at all, because you’ll try it and sometimes it will work and sometimes it won’t, which is frustrating and makes Opera seem buggy and inconsistent.

Here are the major hurdles I’ve hit so far…

Zooming in is too limited. For example, I like the Very Demotivational blog which I usually read on my phone when I’m at a loose end for a few minutes. You need to be able to zoom in to read the captions, but with Opera this is as far as you can zoom:

Now that doesn’t look too bad in a screenshot, viewed on a computer screen, but when you’re looking at it on a 3.5-inch phone screen it’s difficult to read the smaller caption. For comparison, I usually keep up to date with Very Demotivational in an RSS reader, which can zoom in just fine:

Tabbed browsing is a big disappointment. I like the way that Opera shows thumbnails along the bottom of the screen, which you can show or hide with one click. But rather than showing them in a row that you can drag left and right, it shows them overlapped so you only see the edge of each thumbnail.

You can see in that screenshot that I had four pages loaded in tabs.  Earlier on though, also with four pages loaded, Opera decided to clear all pages to save memory:

Sometimes, in Safari, I like to set three or four pages loading in separate tabs, so that by the time I start the last one loading, the first one will have finished and I can start reading it. Try doing that in Opera though and it throws a fit, with all pages grinding to a halt. Push it too far and the whole app goes wobbly, resulting in you losing access to the control bar, and you need to quit the app. Even though you can see the bottom of the controls, you can’t do anything with them:

Other niggles:

• There’s no search history in the Google bar.
• No persistence between sessions. You close Opera, open it again, and all of your web pages have closed. Would be much better to keep them open like Safari does.
• No javascript. This is an Apple-imposed limitation, so not Opera’s fault, but still it does affect the usefulness of the browser so it must be mentioned. In theory, Opera gets around Apple’s rule by running the javascript on Opera’s own server and then streaming the result to the phone. In reality, the one bit of javascript that I tried to use — the "many more" link at the bottom of Slashdot’s front page — didn’t work.

It’s also worth noting the potential problem with Opera’s use of proxy servers. When you access a web page in Opera, the browser actually sends a request to an Opera server, which loads the page, converts it to a proprietary format, and sends it to the browser.

While testing Opera today there were times when pages took forever to load, even though I could switch to Safari and load them quickly. This, I’m guessing, is because lots of people have jumped on Opera today and the proxy servers are being hammered.

So imagine when there’s a major news story like 9/11 and everyone’s trying to get up-to-date info from online news sources. Opera’s servers won’t be able to cope

That, on its own, is a reason not to use Opera. It’s unrealistic for Opera to expect people to use their browser because ‘it works quite well most of the time’, knowing that they’ll have to switch back to a traditional browser when they really need it to work.

Sorry, but a missed opportunity here, Opera.