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Opera 14 for Android is out, based on Chromium

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Re: Opera 14 for Android is out, based on Chromium

#11

Post by ippisl »

Sprint wrote: post #6

This nicely highlights a problem I see with controlled app store models. I would like to give this a try but looking at reviews I feel like I might not like it (always visible address bar, bigger text). So I might want to downgrade which is not "allowed". I am glad they let users move the navigation bar to the bottom, that is much easier to reach with one hand. I wish there were site specific preferences like on the…

I use opera mobile, downloaded a day ago. The address bar is hidden when you use scroll down, and i don't see any big text on page load.

And regarding readability:i think opera is the best by far - because it has great reflow on zoom.

Re: Opera 14 for Android is out, based on Chromium

#12

Post by ch0wn »

tuananh wrote: post #10
ch0wn wrote: post #8

My personal favorite feature in Opera for Android is that it's available for Android 2.3 and up. That means you can get a modern and secure(!) browser on old or low-end phones that otherwise would never get a modern browser.

Opera 14 is almost unusable on my old Nexus S (Android 2.3).

Bummer. I hadn't had a chance yet to try it on an old device yet as my HTC Desire died recently. But older pre-Chromium versions of Opera ran quite smoothly on it.

Re: Opera 14 for Android is out, based on Chromium

#13

Post by josteink »

rubinelli wrote: post #9
josteink wrote: post #3

I've pushed this to my Galaxy Nexus, but my Asus Transformer TF101 (Tegra2-based) running latest 4.2.2 from source is listed as not compatible. Anyone from the Opera team able to provide a reason for this? Edit: What ewams said. As stated in the article, Opera has restricted tablet-support so far.

Have you tried Firefox? I have an Acer tablet with the same Tegra, and I found the interface and responsiveness much better.

I've found Firefox quickly turning too slow for my taste, especially on my tablet.

This usually only became a problem after a while, after it accrued a bit of history, and local user-data which needs to get searched, cached, updated etc.

To be fair, I've had that problem with lots of browsers, including Chrome.

Re: Opera 14 for Android is out, based on Chromium

#14

Post by joshsharp »

ippisl wrote: post #11
Sprint wrote: post #6

This nicely highlights a problem I see with controlled app store models. I would like to give this a try but looking at reviews I feel like I might not like it (always visible address bar, bigger text). So I might want to downgrade which is not "allowed". I am glad they let users move the navigation bar to the bottom, that is much easier to reach with one hand. I wish there were site specific preferences like on the…

I use opera mobile, downloaded a day ago. The address bar is hidden when you use scroll down, and i don't see any big text on page load. And regarding readability:i think opera is the best by far - because it has great reflow on zoom.

I'm so glad they figured out how to get text reflow working with webkit. It was missing in the beta and I was ready to be very disappointed. Not sure why more people don't love it, to be honest.

Re: Opera 14 for Android is out, based on Chromium

#15

Post by CWIZO »

Has anybody tried this out on Hacker News? How does it display comments? The current (previous?) version handled this beautifully and was pretty much the only reason I used it as my default browser (chrome for instance is a total and utter FUBAR when it comes to text wrapping making in unusable (and I can't believe they still haven't fixed this)).

Re: Opera 14 for Android is out, based on Chromium

#16

Post by Sprint »

ippisl wrote: post #11
Sprint wrote: post #6

This nicely highlights a problem I see with controlled app store models. I would like to give this a try but looking at reviews I feel like I might not like it (always visible address bar, bigger text). So I might want to downgrade which is not "allowed". I am glad they let users move the navigation bar to the bottom, that is much easier to reach with one hand. I wish there were site specific preferences like on the…

I use opera mobile, downloaded a day ago. The address bar is hidden when you use scroll down, and i don't see any big text on page load. And regarding readability:i think opera is the best by far - because it has great reflow on zoom.

Just noticed that about the address bar, works nicely indeed.

Re: Opera 14 for Android is out, based on Chromium

#18

Post by Sprint »

Just installed it on my Nexus One, agent is set to Desktop. Reddit (.compact) and other sites are rendered with a serif font now, scrolling is not fluid anymore but jerking in "waves". If I scroll fast everything is displayed blurred.

It lost all my cookies.

Font sizes are all over the place, sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller. It does not render like the desktop anymore. Zooming in, the text is not wrapped to fit the window width (GOD WHY, this feature was fantastic and intuitive, who on earth would not want that and why?) (you can re-enable it in the settings). With text wrapping re-enabled it takes ~10 seconds (I counted on heise.de) to render when I zoom in. On HN it is slightly faster (6-7s).

It does not display the state of downloading in the address bar (or anywhere) anymore so I cannot prematurely stop loading a heavy website when I just want to read text.

There is a second+ delay between clicking the X or refresh icon and the resulting action in the address bar. Same for clicking links in webpages (the indication of what you clicked is much less visible than before).

Overall verdict: Quite unusable on my device because of being very slow. User interface has regressed. This is terrible (and I say that as a Opera fanatic). I am glad I kept a backup of the apk so I can downgrade.

Re: Opera 14 for Android is out, based on Chromium

#19

Post by resurge »

CWIZO wrote: post #15

Has anybody tried this out on Hacker News? How does it display comments? The current (previous?) version handled this beautifully and was pretty much the only reason I used it as my default browser (chrome for instance is a total and utter FUBAR when it comes to text wrapping making in unusable (and I can't believe they still haven't fixed this)).

Yup, text wrapping doesn't work, it's slow and the font sizes are all over the place for some reason.

I'm disappointed, hopefully this will get fixed in later versions.

Re: Opera 14 for Android is out, based on Chromium

#20

Post by Sprint »

CWIZO wrote: post #15

Has anybody tried this out on Hacker News? How does it display comments? The current (previous?) version handled this beautifully and was pretty much the only reason I used it as my default browser (chrome for instance is a total and utter FUBAR when it comes to text wrapping making in unusable (and I can't believe they still haven't fixed this)).

By default it does display threads with posts in different font sizes and not wrapping lines if you zoom in. If you enabled text-wrapping (it is not a default anymore for god knows why), it will display with nice text-wrapping like earlier but it is so slow that it is unusable on my Nexus One.
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