Opera announced on Monday that its Opera Mini for iPhone was approved by Apple for distribution via the App Store. Though App Store restrictions have so far limited alternate browsers to those that use the built-in capabilities of WebKit, Opera Mini is the first true alternative browser—rendering engine and all—to challenge Mobile Safari. And it's popular right now: it's at the top of the free app charts on the iTunes Store throughout Europe at the time of publication.
Opera Mini gets around Apple's restrictions on downloading and executing scripts—needed to execute JavaScript—by using a proxy server for all connections. When you request a webpage in Opera Mini, the request is sent to Opera's servers, which then download the page. Then Opera's servers prerender and repackage the content into an ostensibly wireless network-friendly package for quick downloading to a mobile device. Opera Mini then renders the content on your iPhone using its own rendering engine.
The idea behind this is that Opera Mini should be faster to download and render Web content, and should look much better than some phones' anemic and/or WAP-only browsers. Opera Mini is quite popular on some other platforms, and Opera claims that it has over 50 million users worldwide. Unfortunately for Opera Mini for iPhone, though, Mobile Safari has raised our expectations of what a mobile browser should be.
When it comes to rendering quality, Mobile Safari wipes the floor with Opera Mini. WebKit is a great rendering engine, and far and away the most popular one on mobile devices—it's in webOS, Android, and Symbian, in addition to iPhone OS. Webpages render about as fast as the iPhone can download them, layouts look the same as their desktop counterparts, and type and graphics look great.
Opera Mini, on the other hand, is pretty hit or miss. Layouts have a number of quirks, like the fact that all text seems to be rendered in Helvetica—not even common "Web safe" fonts like Georgia or Arial are used by Opera Mini. Even using Helvetica, though, most pages are completely unreadable when zoomed out. Clearly Opera Mini isn't using the iPhone OS's built-in text rendering APIs.
That's not too bad, since Opera Mini can quickly zoom in. However, double-tapping on sections showed unpredictable behavior. Sometimes it zoomed in too much, or too little, or just didn't zoom at all.
Once zoomed in, Opera Mini seems fine. Text is easy to read and pages scroll quickly. It's much harder to avoid accidental diagonal scrolling when scanning a page, though, since Opera Mini lacks the vertical scrolling lock that Mobile Safari uses.
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar