Soup of the Day

Phantom of the Opera (9)

A tale of two Opera’s

This week Opera Software released a new version of the Opera desktop web browser, bringing it to version 9. But they didn’t stop there, Opera Mini 2.0 for mobile devices was also released for almost all Java enabled phones and PDA’s.

Opera has always been the ‘other’ web browser in the market. The people that use it regularly swear by it and wouldn’t dream of using another browser. From my perspective Opera has been a browser to watch, but it also was one to watch for. Like MSIE, Opera had implemented most, but not all, of the W3C standards for CSS rendering and (X)HTML interpretation. This meant that sites designed for fully compliant browsers, such as Firefox, Mozilla and Safari, would not necessarily look the same in Opera.

But that is all old news now. After spending a day testing Opera 9 across a number of sites, particularly ones I knew Opera had trouble rendering in the past, it seems the team at Opera have ironed out the creases and delivered an excellent browser. It is so good in fact that I am now elevating Opera as a real alternative to Microsoft’s solutions on the Windows platform. Although it should be mentioned that Opera 9 runs on Windows, Mac OS X as well as many flavours of UNIX and Linux.

At the same time that Opera 9 was launched, Opera Mini 2.0 was also released. Opera Mini is a small Java version of the browser, created specifically for mobile devices. The Sony Ericsson browser that came standard with my K600i is okay, but when I try to view a number of XHTML standard web pages, it struggles to render them in a manner suitable for the screen size.

Now I have installed Opera Mini 2.0 onto my phone, almost every page that is formatted correctly views on my phone with ease. Opera Mini’s rendering engine condenses images and text to fit the device screen and delivers a full suite of tools for viewing various web resources. I could go on and on about how all pages rendered beautifully in Opera Mini 2.0, but I figured you should try it for yourselves.

To get Opera 9 : http://www.opera.com/download

To get Opera Mini 2.0 :

1. Open your phones WAP browser
2. Let your phone connect to the web
3. Point your WAP browser to http://mini.opera.com

To find out more about Opera Mini, click here…