Opera Mini is hot in the App Store but is it really a hot app?

Opera Mini hit the App Store a few days ago and became an instant hit in every country. I downloaded it as soon as it was available and tested until today. In short, it’s not a surprise Apple applied it – there actually are plenty of other web browsers in the App Store. And it’s also not a surprise Opera Mini isn’t better than Safari. Why exactly? Continue reading.

Opera has its pros. It’s very fast. The tabbed browsing is much easier than in Safari. The home screen with the Top Sites alternative called Speed Dial is awesome. Finally, scrolling and general reactions to touching are quicker – probably due to shorter delays.

But there are the cons, too. The fast browsing comes at price. The scalled down view of the sites is a result of compression, not actual minified render like in Safari. As a result, it’s impossible to read even the headlines, only the images are visible. The zooming is not smooth too – it’s either on all the way or off. Opera cannot be set as a default browser, which makes it a problem to use with other apps.

There is a glitch when switching between the portrait and landscape modes. Thus the page is either not stretched enough and leaves a white margin on the right, or gets overstretched beyond the viewport. Another thing is the context menu – it appears when you hold your finger long enough, but then doesn’t let you swipe to the options – you have to lift off and tap.

There are some deeper problems too. I was writing this article in Opera, but it turned out I couldn’t submit it fully. Seems like the POST request is buggy. Also, text input in Opera doesn’t support auto- correction. I switched to Safari now and writing apostrophes is finally automatic.

To conclude, so far it feels pretty like a beta. The quite obvious UI problems should be fixed soon. It’s good there is an alternative on the App Store, but it is not like the first web browser there. There are plenty already, but mostly using WebKit. And with Opera appearance, a new problem for the devs rises – a different rendering engine is on the block.

Although competition is good for the business, here it will create you more work required to prepare your websites and webapps for Opera. Cause it doesn’t use many of the CSS3 features for example, and the unity of the iPhone platform was actually a big advantage. Hence, Opera has a long way to go to be really good. I’m sure it will follow this path, but in the mean time I’ll stick to Safari.