Dare to Dream?

Opera Mini 4 – Early morning review :)

Posted on June 24, 2007, 6:48 am, by Mayank Jain (makuchaku).

Its 6:33 AM now & I was about to go to bed before mom offered to make me some tea so I decided to pick up bro’s laptop & was checking out J2ME design patterns when I saw Opera Mini 4 Beta release news on Airlan San Juan’s Blog. I decided to give it a shot before I hit the sack!

The beta version is smaller in size than the 3.1 version – but packs a whole lot of cool new features!!!

The Beta version now has mouse support & panning/zoom support – something very similar to Microsoft’s DeepFish project & somewhat like the Series 60 Browser. The Beta still uses similar UI as used by the 3.1 version. Browsing was undoubtedly better with the Beta version as it rendered the pages (almost) exactly as they would appear on a PC browser and the ability to navigate to anywhere on the page using a mouse pointer was fantastic!

However, when the page loads – the text gets reduced to unreadable size. So if a web page is new to the user, this method of pan & zoom is of little use because sometimes its difficult to guess where that interesting piece of information lies… The pan/zoom feature, btw – works even while the page is still loading.

The bugs – browser UI is very unresponsive. I had to wait for almost 2 seconds each time for the joystick click to actually fire the event. Uploading files is still not supported (not a bug, but a future feature maybe). And I still cannot set Google as my search engine at the home page screen – Moreover, AJAX is not fully supported – I tried replying to a scrap on Orkut & the event required a full page reload.