Battle of the browsers

Ten years ago, the idea that we’d be viewing complex webpages on our phones was preposterous. We didn’t have the screens, we didn’t have the broadband speeds, and we didn’t have mobile browsers. Well, we didn’t have anything resembling a smartphone either.

During those dark days, if you wanted to get information from the Internet you could only get poorly rendered WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) pages that were strewn with text and a few graphics but took forever to load on slow network speeds.

Fast forward to 2010 and, save for the Flash plug-in, we have mobile browsers that are just as capable as their desktop counterparts and which manage to innovate with multi-touch features, pinch-to-zoom, as well as gestures to control how we navigate websites on smartphones. As a result, the number of people accessing the Internet from mobile devices is growing at a staggering rate. Let’s look at today’s emerging mobile browsers.

Opera Mobile

Opera is one of the older mobile browsers. Opera Mobile first appeared in the year 2000 on the Psion Series 7 and netbook and was later ported to Windows Mobile OS in 2003.

Opera Mobile 10 is built for speed and it manages to do this using the Presto layout engine and Opera Turbo that compresses webpages via Opera Software’s “Turbo” servers. Because webpages are compressed, page loading times are improved and bandwidth consumption is reduced by up to 80%.

The browser can dynamically reformat webpages for small screens using Opera's Small Screen Rendering (SSR) technology and text-wrapping.

Opera Mobile 10 includes a "Speed Dial" feature that allows the user to add links shown as thumbnail images in a page displayed when a new tab is opened. Once set up, this feature allows the user to more easily navigate to the selected webpages. Visual tabs, meanwhile, allow users to browse multiple sites at one time. Mobile 10 also includes a password manager, pop-up handler, and supports copy-and-paste, address auto-complete, zooming, history, and bookmarks.

We’ve used Opera Mobile on Symbian, Android, and Apple’s iOS and it is equally fast on all three platforms. We do prefer the Android implementation on a Google Nexus One as the browser really makes use of the device’s processing power and really speeds up the surfing experience. Opera Mobile 10 is definitely firing on all cylinders and is the quickest performer all around.