A revolutionary version of Opera Mini has been released to beta.
Here’s what some Opera folks had to say about the new beta:
With the new Opera Mini beta, code-named ‘Dimension’, we are adding features and functionality to make browsing on mobile phones easier and more enjoyable. As you’re aware, currently Opera Mini displays webpages in a single column layout. Opera Mini nicely reformats the page to fit the small size of your phone’s screen. This works for most sites, but may not be a good solution for sites with intensive menus or structures like eBay or Amazon.
We’re introducing a new layout mode, called ‘PC view’. When arriving at a webpage, Opera Mini will first show you a thumbnail overview of the page, with the original desktop layout retained. Using the mouse cursor (or stylus) you can move around the little rectangle zoom box to zoom in. The zoom is done instantly.
The benefits of ‘PC View’ is a) Since there is immediate recognition of the page, the page is easier to start using. and b) it’s easier to navigate pages, since menus and other elements are in the same position as on the PC.
We first developed this kind of zoom for the Opera browser on the Nintendo Wii. We call it ‘Intelligent zoom’.
When zoomed-in, for example on a New York Times, the text (content) will intelligently adapt to the width of your screen, eliminating horizontal scrolling.
Here’s an example of PC View pre-zoom:
and then zoomed in:
We’ve also added a virtual mouse to make it easy to scroll in any direction. When hovering over a link, the mouse will change to the familiar hand pointer. Links are also highlighted in a smarter way (which makes it much easier to recognize links).
This beta is a complete rewrite of our code. We’ve added support for handheld stylesheets, HTML Tables, more advanced CSS support, Bi-directional text.
The new beta also caches page content between pages. This means that if you first load page A on a site, and then page B, and they share data/text/images, only the difference will be sent.
It also has a new shiny look, with polished UI graphics.
We’ve also added a context menu to Opera Mini. Pressing the ‘1’ number key will show the context menu, giving you quick access to reload the page in another rendering mode (i.e. Fit-to-width or PC View).
Here are some key points to Opera Mini:
- The desktop overview mode presents Web content in a familiar way, ensuring that users are comfortable while browsing, and reducing barriers to adoption.
- High-grade compression ensures fast loading times and a great user experience.
- Improved standards support provides more powerful tools to Web developers that design for mobile.
- The platform-independent architecture gives a broad handset coverage, making Opera Mini compatible with any Java-enabled mobile phone.
All of the new features and functionality that we added, make Opera Mini the internet choice for mobile phones. Here are some quick stats and facts about Opera Mini.
- We first released Opera Mini in the beginning of 2006.
- More than 15 million users have downloaded Opera Mini to their phones.
- The download size of Opera Mini is less than 100kb, which makes it run on nearly all phones (so long as they have Java installed, which most phones already do).
- Opera Mini works with a remote server, which pre-processes Web pages before sending them to your phone. Web content is compressed (by about 90%) to reduce the size of data transferred, enabling handling on simpler phones and creating fast browsing at low costs.
- Since it’s launch in early 2006 Opera Mini users surfed more than 5.2 billion pages.
- Sun Microsytems, makers of Java, announced about a month ago that Opera Mini is the world’s most popular download-able Java mobile application.
Head over to the Opera Mini Beta signup.