Opera Mobile for Android Released – Review and Performance Benchmark
Today, Opera released their popular mobile browser for Android. If you’ve already used Opera Mini for Android you not notice any changes in interface but under the hood Opera Mobile is full featured web browser. Opera mini first sends request to opera servers which then renders and convert webpage in to OBML (opera binary markup language) that OBML is then returned and rendered on Opera Mini’s screen. Unlike Opera Mini, Opera Mobile renders web page locally which enables it to handle dynamic content using JavaScript/Ajax. If you have slow internet connection you can enable Opera Turbo which returns compressed images to reduce page load times.
Benchmark & Review
As Opera mobile comes with great rendering capabilities, I did a quick benchmark to compare it with stock Android web browser. I started with Acid Test Opera Mobile scored 100 / 100 while stock browser scored 93/100.
To test its HTML5 capabilities i used HTML5 Test, Opera mobile scores 72/ 300 which is very low as compared to default web browser’s 176/300 score.
To test JavaScript performance I used SunSpider Benchmark, Stock web browser completed benchmark in 5944.5ms while Opera mobile completed it in 14009.6ms which is 2.3 times slower than stock browser.
JavaScript performance is slow because Opera Mobile for android lacks JIT support, once its implemented you will see significant speed improvement.
Final Thoughts
Overall experience was ok but not that great. It crashed after few seconds when I ran it for the first time. It takes 20.03 MB space on phone storage and when moved to SD card it still takes 13.6 MB on phone storage. Pinch to zoom also seems to be buggy some times it doesn’t work when screen is in landscape mode. For now I’ll stick with default web browser and wait for its improved version.
Download
Opera Mobile is available for free from Android Market! scan the QR code or go to m.opera.com
[image via Opera]
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Kryptic on November 9th, 2010 at 4:32 PM
Yes in-terms of css rendering its good but it doesn’t have flash support and clicking on youtube video opens youtube app instead of playing it in browser, we have to wait and see when it comes out of beta and bugs are fixed. For now default Android browser is good.