The Blackberry’s Big O

No, I’m not talking about Oprah or Obama or Osama; I’m talking about Opera, the web browser.

Why speak of Opera when I’ve made it quite clear that I’m a big fan of Mozilla’s foxy open-source browser? The reason is that, with the exception of the iPhone and some of the more cutting edge mobile internet devices out there, web browsers on mobile phones suck.

1. They suck because they are capable of very little. The little pages that you see on most mobile phone screens is stripped of animations, Flash, most DHTML effects, etc — neutering some websites and rendering all but the websites with custom mobile versions as hideous blobs of letters.
2. They suck because they have horrible User Interfaces. An application does not have to have an intuitive interface like the one on iPhone/iPod Touch to have a work-able user interface. The way that the user interface on the Blackberry browsers is designed, however, is the exact opposite of work-able. The clunky interface makes it very difficult to navigate larger web pages. The browser also makes no attempt to auto-rescale websites and sizes, or to auto-detect what user interface mode makes the most sense.
3. They suck because they look and feel nothing like the browser on a computer. This may seem like a nit-picky point, but it lies at the heart of the problem with the mobile browser — it’s supposed to be modeled off software which we are all very familiar with, but it ends up falling short by not making a good effort to emulate, but by focusing more on the device’s limitations (limited screen-size and bandwidth) rather than the device’s potential (emulation to simulate most of the features from a desktop browser).

Opera Mini is Opera’s attempt to solve all three of these problems (hat tip: A. Ow). Opera Mini is a mini-browser Java app which speeds up the browsing experience by fetching all web-pages through a proxy server which performs on-the-fly calculations to rescale webpages and determine the best way for the user to start browsing the page. This is fed back to your phone, making the download faster and allowing the browsing experience to be smoother. Unlike the default mobile browser, Opera Mini attempts to strip down web pages as little as possible, oftentimes preserving the look and feel of the website (the Opera Mini demo shows what sites will look like in Opera Mini) including some Javascript and CSS.

I would strongly encourage people who either use the Internet on their Blackberries a lot or who want to but can’t stand the default Blackberry browser to download this.

On the part of Opera, this is quite a good business ploy — not only because this may mean they can one day capture the mobile browser market, but because I was so impressed with Opera Mini, I actually downloaded and tried the Opera browser for my laptop.