

Opera 14 for Android is out, based on Chromium - tbassetto
http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/opera-14-for-android-is-out

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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.

~~~
anovaskulk
Same experience here, running this on my HTC Desire. At least Opera is nice
enough to provide older apks here:

<http://arc.opera.com/pub/opera/android/>

I downgraded mine promptly. Future doesn't look good though.

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porlw
Is there any way to force it to keep the assets for open tabs in the web page
cache?

If I have a few tabs open I should be able leave the browser, run enough stuff
(take a call, play a game, text) to force the browser code to flush from
memory, and come back and view the pages I have open without having to endure
ANY reloading.

This seems to be a problem with all the android browsers I've tried.

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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)).

~~~
dalys
I think it works very good when text wrapping is turned on. But it acts a bit
strange when it's off. Tried it just now on my Samsung Galaxy S3.

Text wrap off:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/at5w97ecle0euwv/2013-05-21%2014.52...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/at5w97ecle0euwv/2013-05-21%2014.52.10.png)

Text wrap on:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ndx19cgmcd823k/2013-05-21%2014.53...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ndx19cgmcd823k/2013-05-21%2014.53.28.png)

Text wrap on and zoomed in:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/s2jsps4vhhdq3rq/2013-05-21%2014.54...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/s2jsps4vhhdq3rq/2013-05-21%2014.54.39.png)

~~~
CWIZO
The last one is great. The first is a bit better than Chrome's but not by
much. But I'll wait until they sort out the performance issues.

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yareally
Looks like they didn't forward port opera:config and don't have a chrome:flags
page so far either (or opera:flags). It's a little laggy on my galaxy nexus,
but no gesture based controls like the stock browser is kind of disappointing
since opera (desktop) is always known for its gestures.

Text reflow working is nice though.

~~~
solox3
opera:config does not work, but about:config does; it shows a curated list of
applicable settings.

~~~
yareally
Hmm, I tried it and it redirects me to about:blank

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Sprint
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 desktop version. Being
able to block image loading for selected websites or forcing a css mode would
greatly reduce my bandwidth costs and increase readability.

A great feature of Opera Mobile is that you can save pages for later offline
reading.

~~~
ippisl
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.

~~~
joshsharp
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.

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ch0wn
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.

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

~~~
ch0wn
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.

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devb0x
I've used opera for ever. On my old symbians, my win boxes and even on my
netbook (ubuntu)

but since I read that they moving off their own engine to webkit who cares.

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josteink
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.

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

~~~
josteink
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.

~~~
bobsoap
I've had this problem with every browser I've tried on both the tablet and the
phone. Opera pre-chrome provides the only halfway decent and useable solution.

After reading all the comments on here, I'm pretty sure I won't "upgrade" to
their Chrome version anytime soon. It's a shame.

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samuel
Feels slower on my Galaxy S Plus. I'll try it a bit more, but the first
impession ain't good...

~~~
container
Just auto-updated on my SGS+. First impression; almost unusable, although it
used to be OK before. Got up to my desktop to write this comment, because
Opera Mobile just became unresponsive and I didn't expect it to ever make it
here (though it was on WLAN). After a reboot, went to m.slashdot.org and it
took >5 seconds to respond to swipes even after loading, then got stuck for 15
secs when trying to type a new url.

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antihero
It's really _really_ slow.

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KORraN
I was long time Opera fan, but since sometime it's getting from bad to worse.
For me Dolphin is the best browser for Android. On desktop I use Firefox, but
mobile version has problems with rendering fonts.

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pasbesoin
This is one that I think, barring a critical security concern, I'll give a
couple of days before adopting. At least.

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arianvanp
Yay. The only reason I still tested for opera support was their rather popular
mobile browser. Good to see them move to chromium. One less testcase

~~~
dgesang
> Good to see them move to chromium. One less testcase

Yay. Because staying in your comfort zone is more important than software
diversity.

