Speaking as an iPhone user and enthusiast, I was thrilled when Opera for the iPhone finally got accepted into the App Store fold. It seems, however, that my early excitement was premature, with the app sporting a fair few flaws.
It’s as simple as this:
o The advertised speed? Not there. Yes, this could be due to a random glitch, busy servers, my specific setup, or numerous other problems, but at the end of the day, I tested eight random sites, and seven of them loaded slower in Opera than in Safari. A few of them even took a good three to four times longer (using my patented “1-1-thousand, 2-1-thousand, 3-1-thousand” timing method) than in Safari.
o The page rendering is clunky, ugly and useless. Readable graphics? Yeah, right. The entire rendering system scarily reminded me of early Citrix days, with low-bit color interpretation creating messy graphics that were as readable as a pizza menu when you’re tanked.
o The compressed method of delivering pages as a big image-map-of-sorts practically fights you tooth-and-nail when you try and interact with the page in any way. JavaScript menus that pop open? Require a refresh. AJAX features? Require a refresh. Etc.
o Scrolling and zooming is clunky and annoying. It’s very “Early 2000s Nokia”, rather than Apple-esque. You can’t read the text when zoomed out, but zooming in-and-out to navigate the page makes you just want to give up.
o You can’t set Opera Mini as the default browser, so clicking links in your emails and other apps still open in Safari. I’m sure there are fanboys out there who are happy to select a shortcut from the email client, copy it, open Opera, paste it into the browser address bar, and hit “Go,” but I’m not one of them.
It’s not all bad news, though.
The quick-dial launcher on start-up is a nice touch, though really it’s no different to Safari opening with its bookmarks, except for the added thumbnails.
The tabbed interface is definitely a lot easier than using Safari’s window switching.
And I’m sure there’s more positive aspects to this “Safari-killer,” but sadly I didn’t stick with it enough to find out. The aforementioned problems were enough to make me give up.
While it’s nice to see other options popping up out there, this particular one just isn’t worth the sacrifices in my opinion.
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Sen is a corporate web dev geek, mobile internet addict, and all-round great guy. He manages a large state-government website, develops web projects on the side, and spends so much time playing with mobile/cellular gadgets that his wife regularly resorts to texting him when dinner is ready. You can read more from Sen on his blog, CtrlRefresh
