http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and ... nth-657536

'Opera considering phoning EU again'

I doubt it

Fennec is sh*t, I used it for a while in the recent state, tried the latest Opera 10 beta for Windows mobile and it is FAR better. The only thing Opera 10 lacks is Flash/plugin support which it will get before release, Fennec is slow and bloated compared to Opera 10, Opera just looks and feels nicer

Opera mobile is a significant improvement on the Nokia inbuilt browser, making surfing just about bearable, hopefully Firefox Mobile will be even better.

The really interesting thing will be if (when) it's released for the iphone and symbian phones.

Shame it isn't on the iphone.

http://www.opera.com/mobile/

Won't be on the iFail, as it's an app that is competitive to Apple's existing apps

They might release it on Android though, no fail submission process there.

Firefox Mobile has the plugin support as a bonus.... but when sites render in mobile view anyway there isn't much need for adblock etc.

Fennec is crap though, try the demo on a WM emulator, it's unusable compared to Opera 10, it's VERY slow to start, slow to use and takes up a lot of memory. It's not intuitive either considering it's meant to be a mobile version of firefox nothing seems the same, UI is different in design and layout.

I've used Fennec over the beta period, and I happened to have the officially supported phone they were doing the development on... It took 4 releases before it would actually start up!

It uses so much memory, it blows the limits imposed by Microsoft for a single application, and instead of trying to make the code more efficient, they spent weeks bellyaching about how poor the Windows Mobile memory management is and how the memory limits shouldn't be there...

Give that most devices have around 128-256MB RAM, allowing any one process to access a maximum of 32MB is pretty generous. But instead of taking it as a challenge to prove how good they can write code, they moaned about it.

I think the 5th release actually initialised, but it still blew up when loading the home page!

It is improving, but it goes to show how much modern programmers are taught on writing "pretty" code as opposed to efficient code, there will always be more memory and performance to make up for the inefficiencies in the code.

When I started programming, we were limited to 4KB pages, the minis and mainframes had 64KB pages and 128KB RAM, that was enough to for mail, IM, word processing and a manufacturing system controlling a production line for 250 users!

When I looked at the source code for Gold Runner (a parallax vertical scrolling shoot-em-up from around 1984), the code for the C64 was tight and fitted inside the 64KB of the systen. The Amiga port just squeezed into the 512KB memory of the Amiga! Okay, the graphics were more detailed, but the real reason was, the delay loop, to slow down the aliens in lower levels, gradually increasing the speed, was around 6 bytes of code, the same delay loop on the Amiga was just hundreds of pages of NOP instructions! (NOP = No Output; i.e. don't do anything, just waste a clock cycle)

Dave, have you tried the latest Opera 10 beta for WM?

No, not yet. I use my iPhone now, the WM sits in my desk drawer, there wasn't an upgrade available when I last looked.

I might give it a look-see next week.

I have Opera Mini 5 beta 2 on my Blackberry. It is a huge improvement over Mini 4 and pisses over the Blackberry browser.
If there is a BB version of Firefox mobile, I will give that a go.

Just downloaded the latest nightly of Fennec... At least it shows pages now, but it feels like it is runnig in treacle. They certainly has a looooong way to go in optimisation and testing before it will be ready for general consumption.

The 17 warning dialog boxes when loading the app didn't help either...

The first page load took ages - heise.de, normally loads in about 2-3 seconds on Opera, took over a minute in Fennec, but afterwards subsequent pages loaded faster. Zooming was incredibly inprecise and sluggish.

Installed Opera Beta and it looks much more professional. It installed cleanly, with no warning dialogs. It started quickly and the icons are a nice size for finger touch usage.

The quick list page is great. The pages render more quickly and they scroll more smoothly with O10.

Neither can compete with Safari on the iPhone for speed or ease of use, but as I don't have a multi-touch screen, that is hardly surprising.

Both use around 15% of available memory on the 'phone.

Opera is a much better bet than Fennec, at the current time, but neither can really hold a candle to either the Android or iPhone.

Nokia Maemo or Windows Mobile at the moment.