(digi.no)
Always nice with a new entrant in a game. Products tend to be pretty bad when there’s only one of them, and only one to produce them. For everything but the iPhone, where Safari reigns supreme, there’s been the choice between some shitty browser, Internet Explorer for Mobile, and Opera’s two offers, Mini and Mobile. My personal choice is in 90% of the cases the Mini because it offers some really sweet speeds almost regardless of how shitty my connection is (which counts for a lot when you’re using the Touch ******* Dual in Modalen), and it’s handling of articles and websites in general is pretty damn good, while at the same time compressing the pages on the server-side, giving me less expenses.
Since I’m a huge fan of competition I always thought the new Fennec by Mozilla and Skyfire would be a couple of awesome entrants to keep Opera on their toes. I haven’t gotten around to test Fennec yet, so I won’t comment on it, but I did some extensive browsing with the Skyfire browser for Windows Mobile, and boy was I disappointed.
Granted, it handles flash, but as I barely, if at all, use flash when I’m on the go I didn’t really see the big bonus in it. It’s sort of like having a DVD player in my car stereo that I might be using when I’ve stopped the car for some reason, but otherwise it’d remain unused.
I’ve used Opera Mini and Opera Mobile for a long, long time now, and I know my preference between the two (Mini), and I enjoy surfing with them if I take the time to do so or need to. Usually I read articles, google, who knows. The point is that while the Skyfire had it’s merits, it was pretty unwieldy to read with, and while it supports varying levels of zoom I’ve kind of gotten used to both Operas simply aligning stuff to the screen for me automatically.
The resolution, or whatever you can call it, makes it extremely grainy and tiresome to look at even after it is done loading. It kept making me want to wipe the screen for the dust that wasn’t really there. It was also sluggish to browse with, sometimes taking up to a minute to load the parts of the page I wasn’t looking at initially. The way it renders the odd page seems superior to Opera, but the fact that it’s just the odd page really drags it down, and in a lot of cases it didn’t even render parts of them, for example the Google Reader page lacked the log in boxes one day, and the next it was working. It could’ve been a coincidence, but this happened 4 or 5 times.
The frontpage/startpage is pretty neat though, but offers up options for news and services I don’t really care for (though quick access to Twitter and Facebook is neat, oh yes, that’s neat). I care for my google reader, reddit and Opera Link (more bias!). If you’re into Google News, Yahoo news, Hulu and so forth, then this is your cup of tea.
I suppose I’ve missed something, or I’m missing some important point, but I found it a subpar experience compared to either Operas for a number of reasons, chief among them the ease of use and surfing. Skyfire wasn’t particularly awesome at it. It’s major plus is the compression of all kinds of sites resulting in faster speeds (which Opera Mobile will get in 9.7 through Turbo, and Mini already has), and being fairly orientated to the social web and providing content like movies.
It’s ok, not good. Let’s hope it gets better, and that Fennec’s even more awesome. Right now I’m looking forward to Opera Mini 5 and Mobile 9.7 with Turbo.