So, Apple finally approved a new browser for iPhone. And, of course, it could only be Opera Mini, the most popular browser for mobile devices out there. As a previous BlackBerry and Windows Mobile user, I was pretty excited about this. Until I started using it.
I am not biased towards Apple and Safari or anything, but this is a big disappointment for me. Partly because Safari set a very high benchmark for any other iPhone browsers, but mostly because of some idiotic decisions by Opera.
First, there’s the start page. If you ever used Opera Mobile before, you know that it has a feature called ‘speed-dial’, which looks like the same as the current Safari 4 start page, only uglier. The feature itself is fine – and very useful, actually – but the way to configure/manage it is a bit counter-intuitive. You have to hold your finger over the button in order to make a small drop-down menu appear. And there you can edit or clear your speed dial button. Two problems: first, this gesture for this purpose is a bit unusual for iPhone users. We use it everywhere when copying and pasting, but for opening a menu? And the control isn’t much precise too: sometimes you hold the button, the menu appears and then when you release it, it disappears and Opera loads that website. Very annoying. The second problem with this is that multitouch doesn’t work. What’s the purpose of having a multitouch screen if I can’t hold the button with one finger and select the item from the menu using another? This is just stupid. Putting the configuration for this under a menu in Settings would be much more intuitive and avoid these pitfalls.
Second, the zoom is binary. It’s either fully off, and you can’t really see anything unless your eyes have a 0.5 pixel resolution, or it’s fully on and the fonts show up very large and you have to do a lot of scrolling. This is very bad for usability.
Third – and this is not Opera’s fault, I think – the sites all open in their generic mobile versions. For Pete’s sake… I am using an iPhone! I want to see the websites in the same way I see them in my laptop. Or at least get an iPhone-optimized version. But it seems those iPhone versions only open in Safari, and I don’t know yet if it’s just bad implementation by the websites or by Opera.
Fourth: Java Script support sucks. Sorry, I don’t have any word more polite than that to define this.
And there is a last annoying thing is that the browser uses the accelerometer fully. I mean, really. If you’re in landscape mode and tilt your phone slightly to the top side, it’ll flip the screen upside down. I mean… who the hell uses their phone upside down? You don’t get this in Safari or any other sane app. I think only Evernote does this moronic thing.
For you guys who are thinking the browser sucks entirely, here’s an upside. It’s very fast. Not only it renders pages very fast, but the app itself isn’t sluggish at all.
Anyway, let’s hope Opera fixes all the annoying issues. After all, competition is good. 🙂