H-VisualPhotography & Web Design

Recently Apple has approved the Opera Mini Browser for iPhone users available from the App Store so I had to give it a try as an alternative to Safari.

I am liking it!  On several subjective speed tests on popular website such as msn.com and seattlepi.com the Opera Mini was at least 3 times faster than Safari (because it hooks up to its own server).  The user interface is very friendly and intuitive, graphical bookmarks are fun to use and other basic operations are a  breeze.

The tab system is faster than Safari’s animation ( zooming out, slide to another page, zoom in, etc…).  One can switch between pages instantly with the generous tab size making it easy to pick.  This in my mind saves a lot of time and make browsing the web much faster.

On the flip side, pinch zoom is not very predictable and smooth like Safari, but one touch zoom is quick and Opera will rearrange the text to fit the screen.  Another problem is that some web pages are not displayed correctly, especially with pages that contains photo galleries.  Instead of displaying the thumbnails in tables it arranges them in columns, etc…Hopefully this issue will be fixed in future updates.

To sum it up, big thumbs up on Opera Mini’s lightning speed and fast user interface, now if only it could display every pages correctly like Safari.  Still it makes for a good alternative to Safari when you want to do some quick browsing, use Safari if you want to do chores like filling out online forms and such.  Future updates and fixes could potentially bring it to perfection.