Opera 14 for Android is out, based on Chromium

http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/opera-14-for-android-is-out

by tbassetto • 13 years ago

67 39 13 years ago

my.opera.com

arianvanp• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

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

josteink2• 13 years ago

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.

ewams• 13 years ago

From the article: "Note that we don't have an Opera 14 build ready for tablets yet: we're still working on various tablet-specific UI optimizations, and this will be released later on."

rubinelli• 13 years ago

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

josteink2• 13 years ago

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.

samuel• 13 years ago

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

veeti• 13 years ago

Really sluggish on the Note 2 too. Even Chrome is faster.

container• 13 years ago

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.

Sprint4• 13 years ago

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.

ippisl2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

Sprint4• 13 years ago

Just noticed that about the address bar, works nicely indeed.

ippisl2• 13 years ago

Sorry for my bad recommendation: just now my opera mobile updated itself to 14.0 . 14.0 sucks.

csulok• 13 years ago

Well they did have Opera Beta with webkit as a separate app in the appstore for quite a while, that's a good solution for not-liking-thus-downgrading issue.

Also, on the Play Store publishing page, there are features for beta and alpha testing, not sure what they do, but I feel they are relevant as well.

ch0wn2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

ch0wn2• 13 years ago

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.

polshaw• 13 years ago

Not really a great feature of opera mobile 14.. the last version was available for android 2.1+, and Firefox mobile (IMO the best mobile browser) is available for 2.2+.

Sucks for my nook stuck on 2.1, no more updated browser. (I do understand why though, and can't say I blame them).

gcp• 13 years ago

Firefox will work from Android 2.2 and up.

markokocic• 13 years ago

No, it won't. It says that my HTC Desire running 2.3 is not supported.

CWIZO3• 13 years ago

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)).

resurge• 13 years ago

Yup, text wrapping doesn't work, it's slow and the font sizes are all over the place for some reason.

I'm disappointed, hopefully this will get fixed in later versions.

Sprint4• 13 years ago

By default it does display threads with posts in different font sizes and not wrapping lines if you zoom in. If you enabled text-wrapping (it is not a default anymore for god knows why), it will display with nice text-wrapping like earlier but it is so slow that it is unusable on my Nexus One.

jsnell• 13 years ago

I think the battle for working font rendering in Chrome for Android has been lost, the developers apparently consider it "acceptable quality" and are "ramping down development":

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=84186

Which is pretty amazing, considering how Chrome for Android seems to horribly misrender every other site. I'm almost tempted to switch to Opera thanks to them just adding an option to disable this misfeature, even if losing sync with desktop Chrome will be a bit painful.

CWIZO3• 13 years ago

I really don't understand how somebody could consider that to be OK. There's not even any logic (as far as I can tell) behind how it works. To me it appears as if it's randomly assigning font sizes to different DOM elements ...

dalys• 13 years ago

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...

Text wrap on: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ndx19cgmcd823k/2013-05-21%2014.53...

Text wrap on and zoomed in: https://www.dropbox.com/s/s2jsps4vhhdq3rq/2013-05-21%2014.54...

CWIZO3• 13 years ago

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.

antihero• 13 years ago

It's really really slow.

Sprint4• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

yareally2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

yareally2• 13 years ago

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

porlw• 13 years ago

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.

devb0x• 13 years ago

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.

KORraN• 13 years ago

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.

pasbesoin• 13 years ago

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

Opera 14 for Android is out, based on Chromium

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