Comments on: Opera Mobile for Android: Slimmer, safer and faster than Chrome

By: David McCormack

David McCormack — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 15:55:13 +0000

Tech note: When you build an Android app that has portions written in C/C++, the NDK produces multiple CPU-specific flavours of the native library and packages all of these in the .apk archive. At install time, only the flavour of the the native library that is appropriate to the target device gets extracted from the .apk. This is presumably what they are getting at with the “sleek and slender” claim. I would think, however, that the space efficiency of native vs Dalvik (Android’s bytecode) is debatable. It would certainly be very dependent on the type of functionality being implemented in native.

By: MisterKnowItAll

MisterKnowItAll — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 12:21:18 +0000

Opera is the only browser I have found that properly re-flows text after a pinch-zoom to any level of zoom. Other browsers zoom text to fit the page after a double-tap, but further zooming results in no re-flow.

By: Jyothi

Jyothi — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 09:13:10 +0000

That is Opera’s main problem, it is affecting images quality but in other browsers images are shown without affecting it’s quality.

By: Jayanta

Jayanta — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 04:17:35 +0000

Every just talk about speed while comparing Browser, but I have my own criteria – “rendering of page”. I had used almost all the available browser on my android phone, I found one noticeable issues in almost all – the image. When loading the page, only text got adjusted as per my phone screen, but image files goes out of sync. Even I faced the same issue with Chrome. Firefox is the only browser I had tested which render the image file correctly, hence I made it my default.

By: Kevin C. Tofel

Kevin C. Tofel — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 18:19:17 +0000

Peter, I completely agree with your viewpoint: What “works” faster to an individual is far better than any benchmark, which only gives a rough idea of performance in a particular circumstance. I’ve learned from the past though: If I don’t include a benchmark, commenters invariably ask for one. ;)

By: Peter John

Peter John — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 18:04:14 +0000

Do benchmarks really matter that much anymore? I tend to just try the browser out and if it feels faster, I stick with it. Firefox for Android never really gets too much praise from the community…yet it seems to perform best for most of my needs. Chrome (on the other hand) performs like crap on my phone (Nexus S, btw).