Why is Opera mini better than the S60 browser?

silvine

I recently bought an E71 and installed Opera mini on it. However, I can't see why lots of people reckon it's better than the S60 browser.

Opera renders the pages better than the pre-installed S60 browser but I don't have any arrow to move around the page. Only the up and down keys of my phone can navigate where as with the S60 browser you can use the directions keys to move an arrow and select items on the page. Surely this model offers more control?

flodis79

You can move around left and right with opera mini on my phone. I'm not exactly sure what you mean you can't move left and right? Did you install mini version 4? The one where you can minimise the page and get same type of page overview as in the built in browser?

silvine

Yeah it's versiom 4.1.1.11355. I can't minimise the windows or move left or right. The only keys that work are up and down and zoom in and zoom out. When I press the left or right direction key it just seems to scroll down more.

flodis79

Are you only browsing mobile versions of pages? For example, the m.boards.ie v the www.boards.ie. You won't be able to scroll left and right on the mobile version because everything will fit in the window.

axer

silvine wrote: »

Opera renders the pages better than the pre-installed S60 browser but I don't have any arrow to move around the page. Only the up and down keys of my phone can navigate where as with the S60 browser you can use the directions keys to move an arrow and select items on the page. Surely this model offers more control?

There is a cursor to select items on the page with opera mini.

I really like the way it is laid out on the front page with options of web address, search and favourites. There is also that when you visit a page and the page is too large for the small screen it gives you an overview first of the webpage so you can choose where you want to start viewing first (I hate the way the default browser starts at the top left corner).

The only two negatives I see over the default browser is 1. it is slower to startup and 2. it still has to use the default browser to download items but that is not opera's fault.

Overall it is much smoother and a more comfortable browser to use.

blaz

I agree with axer, Opera Mini is a much better browser than the default S60 browser. The largest problem with the S60 browser is, that it is simply very slow. This especially shows when you try to browse a large non-mobile version of a web page, it literally can take minutes even on 3G to download the whole page, both because of the high latency of mobile data communication and also because of the slowness of the S60 browser. Opera Mini uses a proxy that downloads the web page and compresses the contents down to a size usable on a mobile device.

To answer the original question, when you browse mobile-only web pages that horizontally fit on the screen of your device, Opera only enables you to scroll up and down and there is no cursor. I like this a lot, because it is much faster than scrolling the small mouse pointer around a screen. If you want to see a page where you can scroll in all directions in Opera Mini, try to open www.dublinbus.ie using Opera.

silvine

That explains it. I was looking at the wrong page type i.e. mobile ones. Any idea how to cut and paste text or make Opera the default browser? Also every now and again the default Google search in Opera seems to change to Polish!

axer

silvine wrote: »

Any idea how to cut and paste text or make Opera the default browser?

You can't do either.

silvine wrote: »

Also every now and again the default Google search in Opera seems to change to Polish!

The reason Opera mini is faster than alternatives is that it uses proxys but sometimes websites then think you are coming from a different country based on the proxy IP and they then serve the web page based on that language.

I don't know if it works but maybe create a new search option based on the google.ie website since that will always be english (I think).

strecker

silvine wrote: »

That explains it. I was looking at the wrong page type i.e. mobile ones. Any idea how to cut and paste text or make Opera the default browser? Also every now and again the default Google search in Opera seems to change to Polish!

you can not cut/paste text from a page in official opera mini versions, nor can you make it the phone's default browser without some major hacking... You can copy page url's by adding them as bookmarks, than edit the url, copy/cut, then cancel the edit... If that makes sense
so, at least you could paste a web address into a post here or from o.m. into an sms or email (provided, your phone copy/pastes between apps)...
There's a russian "mod" that allows copy paste... But not sure how the board views such "mods"...
Teashark is a webkit-based java browser that is a bit like a hybrid of s60 browser and opera mini. In most phones you can copy and paste! Teashark is currently in public beta; it uses less data than the s60 browser but more than opera mini. It's almost as fast as o.m., has tabbed browsing, but no mobile view... Well, try it...

zuroph

anyone have trouble opening hotmail with opera mini?

strecker

zuroph wrote: »

anyone have trouble opening hotmail with opera mini?

no

zuroph

it keeps asking me to update my browser to deal with live.

andy0

On big pages, I like the faster scrolling using the number keys

someone mentioned the default in Google - I've not seen Polish yet, but Norwegian has appeared a few times, as you'd expect

but other webpages still seem to identify which country you're actually in

silvine

I notice Opera can't play flash videos either. It is a good browser (I know I am nitpickng) but it's far from perfect. How does the Safari browser in the iPhone compare? Any add-ons or plugins I can get to improve Opera? It'd be handy to have some way of sync it to my Delicious, Firefox or Google bookmarks....

strecker

silvine wrote: »

I notice Opera can't play flash videos either. It is a good browser (I know I am nitpickng) but it's far from perfect. How does the Safari browser in the iPhone compare? Any add-ons or plugins I can get to improve Opera? It'd be handy to have some way of sync it to my Delicious, Firefox or Google bookmarks....

no plugins for om...it's designed to be light, fast and work on as many phones as possible...
You can sync om with your opera desktop bookmarks; so if you install opera on your pc, import all your FF and IE bookmarks to opera, you can then sync those with opera mini...
Opera are working on a flash enabled version of opera mobile, but at the moment, the beta version doesn't do flash - they want to iron out all other bugs first! Again: their aim is always to reach as many different phones as possible, so sacrifices have to be made. Pc's generally meet certain standards that browser developers can take for granted, or easily programme plkugins for, but mobile phones vary in specs, OS, etc... You won't find a one-who-does-it-all browser for your phone (even iphone's safari can't do it all!)