Opera Mini - the free java-based little brother of Opera Mobile - has just hit version 4.2 beta.
The biggest improvement so far seems to be the new back-end servers that should give a much more responsive service (Opera caches web pages on its own servers and re-renders them for speed) better YouTube support and Opera Link - a browser based note sharing facility.
According to Opera, their mini browser sees around 20,000,000 downloads a month. Surely that can’t be over a very long period, can it? Can there be any non-Opera users left?
This release also adds support for greater customisation via ’sklins’ that can help Opera Mini better suit your phone’s colour scheme.
The beta release is available to download from Opera’s site.
Bad news if you’ve been waiting to get hold of the latest beta version of Opera’s Opera Mobile web browser. It was due out today, but has slipped. The good news is that it’s only slipped a couple of days, and will now be released on Thursday (17th July).
It’s all down to pesky last-minute bugs, as the development team explain on their official blog: “We encountered a few bugs last week that we needed to fix before we launch,” they write. “The fixes are almost complete now, but we need two more days to run the build through our quality assurance testing.”
The release is hotly-awaited, and promises a host of improvements. It’s already available on certain handsets, such as the HTC Touch Diamond, but it’s taking a little longer than expected to roll it out for wider distribution. Fingers crossed the final testing goes well.
Firefox has been steadily increasing its market share of the web browser market on PCs and Macs, at the expense of Internet Explorer (on the former, at least). It’s been known for some time that it’s going mobile too, but Mozilla Labs’ Aza Raskin has just given us a sneak peek at how Firefox Mobile might work, in a video demo. It’s a working prototype, so may well change before us punters get our hands on it. But the browser is designed for touchscreen handsets, and has iPhone-esque scrolling and zooming, as well as the tabbed browsing approach you’d expect from Firefox. In short, it looks really, really nice. Check the demo out by clicking here. Whatever they do with it, Firefox Mobile will face stiff competition from rivals such as Opera Mini, which is also coming out with a touchscreen-enhanced edition.
Last month we had news of a new browser from Wake3 that promised to bring the WebKit HTML rendering engine - as seen in Apple’s Safari - to Windows Mobile.
It looks as though Torch Mobile has beaten them to it. Their new browser - Iris - was announced yesterday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and it looks very promising indeed.
Iris features an implementation of WebKit that offers tabbed browsing, a tweakable interface and multiple zoom modes. Torch say that the browser also comes with integrated anti-phishing and pop-up blocking features as well as support for both key navigation and touch screens.
WebKit itself is one of the most standards-compliant HTML engines around, meaning Iris should be able to give a ‘desktop’ feel to rendered pages without too much effort.
There is no word on pricing as yet (Torch seem to be aiming to get Iris bundled with a few handsets) but a preview version for Windows Mobile 6 is available here.
Californian developers SkyFire are running a private beta of a new mobile web browser that they claim will offer a ‘desktop’ browsing experience with full AJAX and Flash support.
Details are sketchy at the moment - the private beta is US-only and even there SkyFire are being pretty tight-fisted with the invites - but the browser seems to work a little like Opera Mobile, using a proxy server to compress and optimise pages to better suit a small screen and slow connection.
SkyFire currently works only on selected Windows Mobile devices, but full Windows Mobile and Symbian support is promised.
As soon as Pocket Picks can get it’s eager mitts on a copy we will give you a full review but until then, check out this demo video:
