I used to use it when I used iOS because it was the only alternative browser available and had sane zooming and text wrap features, unlike Safari (at the time, haven't used iOS in a while).
Workarounds for Opera Mini
31–40 of 53 posts
Re: Workarounds for Opera Mini
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not fair to blame web devs for not trying to support a browser that doesn't try to support any standards. We have clients pushing us for cool things that they have seen on other sites, or some interesting (to them) feature that they must have. If we refuse? They go to someone more accommodating.
Then implement them in a way that allows for graceful fall back to just text, etc.
Use progressive enhancement, not fallbacks.
Re: Workarounds for Opera Mini
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then implement them in a way that allows for graceful fall back to just text, etc.
Easier said than done. For a trivial combination, it's easy. For most real world requirements it becomes a combinatorial explosion of various strategies that are mutually exclusive in many parts. Unless you have some new machine learning approach to work out all the platform quirks and arrive at pure fallback nirvana?
Doesn't GWT have something that does pretty much exactly that ?
Re: Workarounds for Opera Mini
#34It's not the browser which is breaking the site; it's the site's developers who are using features which are not universally available. Guess what? If you use simple, clean HTML and progressively enhance with JavaScript, CSS and HTML5 features then everyone can browse your site. Or you can use the absolute bleeding edge of everything, requiring every user to give your code a full VM on his machine (a JavaScript VM, g…
The users don't want a site. They want an app. It's like expecting the developers of the latest, greatest PC game to write a progressively enhanced game that the same executable will run on DOS 1.0 all the way to the latest Windows version. They will spend time and resources on making sure it works with DOS 1.0, even though there are next to zero users for it, making it completely uneconomical, basically working for…
No, sorry, when I visit the Next Web, for example, I don't want 600 kilobytes of CSS and JS just to look at what's basically a list of photos and some text. That is insane by any measure, and I'm not even counting the photos (as they're necessary and there's not much to do about those). It seems to all be there so the site can be a wonder of mystery meat navigation, with clicks randomly bringing elements in and out of focus and taking me to random sites I didn't ask for.
As a moderately seasoned developer, I've seen this in my friends too (you know who you are). They get excited by the latest and greatest technology (which is great and they should) and they apply it to their business without first asking themselves if it's actually beneficial (which is bad and they shouldn't).
Most of them come around to "build it simple at first and optimize later", or YAGNI, but in the mean time, we get things like The Next Web.
$5 TNW's next iteration is plain HTML and simple CSS with a minimal amount of JS and they make a big thing out of how performant their site is now, loading instantly, etc. Good job, you discovered Web 1.0 again, but this time with better designers.
Re: Workarounds for Opera Mini
#35It's not the browser which is breaking the site; it's the site's developers who are using features which are not universally available. Guess what? If you use simple, clean HTML and progressively enhance with JavaScript, CSS and HTML5 features then everyone can browse your site. Or you can use the absolute bleeding edge of everything, requiring every user to give your code a full VM on his machine (a JavaScript VM, g…
The users don't want a site. They want an app. It's like expecting the developers of the latest, greatest PC game to write a progressively enhanced game that the same executable will run on DOS 1.0 all the way to the latest Windows version. They will spend time and resources on making sure it works with DOS 1.0, even though there are next to zero users for it, making it completely uneconomical, basically working for…
> It's like expecting the developers of the latest, greatest PC game to write a progressively enhanced game that the same executable will run on DOS 1.0 all the way to the latest Windows version. They will spend time and resources on making sure it works with DOS 1.0, even though there are next to zero users for it, making it completely uneconomical, basically working for free.
Games aren't a fair comparison; very few sites are anything like games, and gaming has always been pushing the boundaries of technology.
A more favourable comparison would be shipping a "content reader app", based on Windows Metro APIs, when a plaintext file would do just fine (and would work on MSDOS 1.0, if it were ASCII).
Re: Workarounds for Opera Mini
#36I remember a time when opera was supposed to be the browser that implemented web standards the most accurately and completely. What happened? Are they now lagging, or is it just they chose not to support some standards in opera mini for those perfs goals?
Opera Mini isn't regular Opera, it does most of the work server side and sends a highly compressed representation of the web page to the app on the phone.
Re: Workarounds for Opera Mini
#37Sad times for Opera when Opera Mini is called 'unknown'
Re: Workarounds for Opera Mini
#38I remember a time when opera was supposed to be the browser that implemented web standards the most accurately and completely. What happened? Are they now lagging, or is it just they chose not to support some standards in opera mini for those perfs goals?
'Mini' a totally different beast to a normal browser, in order to minimise data usage.
When you request a page in opera mini, that request is sent to Opera's servers. The webpage is rendered on their server [using their rendering engine], and a totally different (OBML) file is sent to your browser, to represent the end result.
'Mini' never sees HTML, Javascript or CSS -- those are handled on the server. This allows the browser to use dramatically less bandwidth... but creates some major limitations.
Opera still makes 'normal' browsers -- and at least in the iOS version, the 'Mini' mode can be switched off [making it render the same as any webkit browser.]
Re: Workarounds for Opera Mini
#39I had a POS low powered Android phone until sometime last year and Opera Mini was by far the best browser for that phone. The native browser was slow as molasses where Opera Mini was actually snappy. It also had a much better UI and features, some of which are not even on my current browser. For example it'd send bitmapped fonts over the server so I could read langauges for which there were no fonts on my phone. How they could do that all so fast I have no idea.
Re: Workarounds for Opera Mini
#40"unknown browser"... Always amazed by these bubbled, insulated-firstworld statements. I lived in europe with unlimited mobile bandwidth and regularly used Opera Mini for a combination of leaner/quicker navigation and removal of undesirable trackers/scripts.
Also its offline pages feature is great for travellers and, 3G/4G doesn't cover 100% of any country.
Try to navigate script-heavy sites on these connections and you'll quickly realize that opera mini restrictions are desirable features.