Opera Mini 4 and WebKit on the N95
Prompted in part by Dennis’s review of Opera Mini on the N95 at WAPReview I snagged the latest Opera Mini on my N95 and tried it out side by side with Webkit for one of the more challenging sites I try at times. My test site is Bay Area Riders Forum, the forums area in particular. Mobile browsers tend to have some real problems with discussion board style sites like these ones.
Both of them did better than I expected. I’ve tried the site a few times from other browsers and different versions of these browsers and I remember having a lot more issues. This time I was able to login, use the popup menus to get to the thread views I wanted, and generally things worked out quite well.
First off, the Webkit based browser that ships with the Nokia. Using the page overview mode you can see that it does a really good job of fitting sections of text to a layout that you can read as a single column on the phone:
It keeps the overall format of the page intact enough that you can tell what the layout really is though. I didn’t expect it to do that as well as it did. I had the font set to the smallest I could get it to go, however it seemed like it still really wasted a lot of space. For instance here’s a shot of reading a section of that article:
For me, that’s tremendous text. There’s quite a bit of wasted space there it seems, and reading is pretty much constant scrolling.
So compare that to the Opera Mini 4.0 version. There’s the map overview, which is the default when entering into a page on mini, which I actually think I like quite a bit:
The same article in Webkit takes up two screens. The fonts are much smaller and the layout seems to be more compact:
That’s a zoomed view of the same section as Webkit, it just includes some of the page from both before and after. This is just one example of course, but from the poking around I think I agree with Dennis, Opera Mini seems to be doing a fantastic job for the N95.
There are a few tiny details in the mini version that kind of wowed me as well. For instance when scrolling up and down the view of a thread in the forums the different levels of responses are indented by different amounts. Each section in both mini and webkit uses the full width of the screen so that it’s easy to read. In webkit you have to follow the level of indent yourself as you scroll, I expected that. In mini however as you scroll up and down it automatically follows the indent level for whatever you were lined up to automatically, both when zoomed in and in overview mode. I didn’t expect that at all, and it makes reading something like that forum that much nicer. Now that’s some intense attention to detail. Excellent job by the Opera Mini folks again.
November 10th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
I recently blogged about the Opera Mini 4.0 screen style sheet issue. Because the desktop Operas they’re using to process pages, it makes sense to serve them the handheld style sheet.