I tried Opera Mini for about an hour yesterday and deleted it after. Despite what a lot of reviews say, its a terrible, terrible browser. I can only assume that the great reviews on the popular sites are only testing Opera on their own popular sites and other popular sites that already exist in Opera’s server cache.
The problem is, I like to go to many sites that aren’t very popular and aren’t caches by Opera. In these cases, OM renders much slower than Safari and it looks like shit. The text is illegible and the CSS is totally broken.
For example, here’s this blog in Safari:
And again in Opera:
Completely asstastic. I have no idea why people were excited about this trash. In addition to the horrible rendering, its clear that Opera isn’t a real iPhone app. It has serious usability issues beyond its primary function. When scrolling, there’s no momentum, no bounce at the ends and no bounce to the top when you tap the menu. These things are included for free in UITextviews or UIWebviews. That’s why the crap browser that you can put into any iPhone app after about ten minutes of work is better than Opera.
I can’t believe that Apple approved this for any reason other than to a) demonstrate just how good Safari really is and b) to remove one more thing that the blogtards can scream about. It certainly wasn’t for the quality or utility of the app.