On 5 Aug 2010, at 23:51, tee wrote:
On Aug 5, 2010, at 2:05 PM, David Storey wrote:
On 5 Aug 2010, at 21:12, tee wrote:
Hi David,
Having done 2 full sites+ many exercise mobile sites, I view at
Opera Mini (including the Mobile 10) the Internet Explorer 6+7,
it's a browser one will hate it, curse it more than praise it :-(
What are your issues with Opera Mobile (Opera Mini has known
restrictions as it is designed for low-end devices which can't
power a full browser; .
Are you mixing up Mini and Mobile,
Oops, I must be. Mini and Mobile sounded very much the same browser
to me, and I got an impression that Opera had consolidated the two
name from Mini to Mobile 10 since the version 5.
No. Opera Mini is for JavaME enabled feature phones and restrictive
devices (such as iOS), but does work on Smart Phones as it works
anywhere (and there are special versions for a number of smart phone
platforms to take advantage of features they offer such as being able
to be set as the default browser, which Java often can't offer)
Opera Mobile is for Smartphone platforms: Symbian, Windows Mobile,
Maemo and Android.
So the one I been using is Opera Mini 5 in my iPod (should this be
called a smart phone equivalent?)
No, iOS doesn't allow Opera Mobile due to its licensing terms and
conditions. It is capable of running browser such as Opera Mobile
technically, but not politically.
, but it does look to me like a full browser (and with many quirks).
We have a shared UI layer across our mobile (and a number of other
devices such as TV) products. On the surface the UI is the same
between Mini and Mobile, but the engine is different. Mobile is a full
Opera Presto rendering engine under the hood. Mini is a thin client
(you could almost think of it as something like a PDF viewer) which
renders on a server and sends the transcoded content to the Opera Mini
client. Mobile runs on more advanced platforms so it will allow for
more things in the UI like higher DPI rendering and such. Mini can
also cope with those things if running on smart phones.
I have experienced many issues in Opera Mini 5 which took quite a
bit of time to get rid of, some were fixed, but these two are quite
stubborn.
1. Pre tag - in portrait view if a line of content is longer than
the device width, it doesn't wrap.
Pre is special in that it doesn't suppose to wrap.
2. padding issue (I think) in the input. If I add a background image
like so and the image has a width of, say, 12px
input {
background: url(search-icon.png) no-repeat left top;
padding: 1px 2px 1px 16px
}
The input has a value of "search site", the text should be pushed
16px to the right. Andriod and Safari obeyed the rule, but Opera
Mini ignores the padding rule which resulting the text and
background image overlapped.
I'd need to see an example, but Mini makes a number of trade-offs to
fit on basic devices, such as the transcoding I mentioned earlier.
This does some reformatting to wrap content to a page width so no
horizontal scrolling of text and such is needed when zooming in
(horizontal scrolling is often difficult on feature phones, and
generally isn't a good experience in general to have to scroll left
and right to read text). This transcoding and line length wrapping
could be causing issues, especially if it works on desktop. The engine
on desktop and the engine run by the Opera Mini server is basically
the same. Some advanced graphical features are not supported (eg.
transforms, border-radius etc.) as they require our Vega graphics
engine to render, which isn't available in the device as it is a thin
client. We could transcode such things technically to images, but that
would be too costly in terms of bandwidth.
I am sure I will find more issues in this browser as I get more
opportunities to work on Mobile version of websites.
Sure. Remember to file bugs: bugs.opera.com/wizard/ . That way we will
fix them if it is possible, as we can't fix issues we don't know
about. Of course there is always trade offs in making a browser for
such limited devices, so we can't promise we will be able to fix
everything.
I often think Opera desktop has paddings/margins/line-height bug
related to EM and % which seems never fixed, but then it might be
Opera way of handling them, and they are carried over to Mini.
Opera has some rounding issues with large values of em's and % yes.
They are on the roadmap to be fixed but it takes time as browsers are
complex and there are always lots of things to fix, and lots of new
HTML5 or CSS3 or SVG features to support which are used by many
popular services and need to be supported. There are trade offs to be
made to support the rounding correctly, but we will fix it sooner
rather than later.
A browser that has only 5+% usage (based from many stats of the
sites I did)
Depends which market you are talking about (Opera Mini is much bigger
than 5% outside of most Anglophone-speaking developed markets and East
Asia), but we are working hard to improve our products to get beyond
that in those markets and desktop. We'll make it eventually.
and offers no browser specific option for developer to tackle a
slight difference that maybe required at time, does make a web
developer hard to love it and embrace it :-)
Not sure what you mean here? If you mean developer tools, we have
those. My other job is Product Manager of Opera Dragonfly, which is
our developer tool set. It also offers remote debugging of Opera
Mobile from the desktop browser, which is a very useful tool for
mobile development.
If you mean offer hacks to allow you to target Opera only, then no we
don't offer those. These hacks by definition are exploiting bugs in
the browser. If there are known bugs then it is a defect in the
browser and we try to identify and resolve those defects. It is part
of making the browser better. You should never rely on defects to
target browsers as they will always be fixed eventually (unless you
are targeting one specific version as a shipped browser is set in
stone). A case in point is developers used to use Media Queries to
target browser specific hacks to Opera. That was quite disastrous as
Media Queries are a standard feature and a) browsers such as Safari
which implemented MQs started getting Opera targeted hacks which broke
that browser and b) Opera generally broke because of those hacks
because we fixed the bugs they were targeting and the alternative
styles which did fix the rendering in Opera versions with that bug
broke with new versions without it.
tee
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David Storey
Chief Web Opener / Product Manager, Opera Dragonfly
W3C WG: Mobile Web Best Practices / SVG Interest Group
Opera Software ASA, Oslo, Norway
Mobile: +47 94 22 02 32 / E-Mail/XMPP: [email protected] / Twitter:
dstorey
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