To start off, let me say that I’m not a huge fan of Opera. I just never really adapted to their desktop browser, and their proprietary rendering engine sometimes tends to subtly “botch” websites that otherwise appear fine in Gecko/WebKit/Trident-based browsers.

However, despite this fact, I have found Opera Mini 5 Beta to be the best mobile browsing experience in the world, even topping Safari on the iPhone/iTouch.

First, A Word On Your Humble Reviewer
You may have read my in-depth iPhone vs. Blackberry article, but if not, here’s the skinny on me as a reviewer: I’m a die-hard crackberry addict, yet I’ve spent almost just as much time using and developing for the iPhone and other smart phones (such as Android and Windows Mobile).

Basically, I’m the one who’s behind the bathroom stall making all that tapping and scrolling noise (my Curve has a trackball-thing).

One of my favorite apps for the Blackberry is the Opera web browser, simply because the Blackberry browser is terrible and as far as I know, Firefox has not released a J2ME version yet. I’ve been using Opera Mini 4 for almost a whole year now as my mobile web browser, and have been very impressed albeit without being “wowed”.

Opera Mini 5 Beta “Wowed” Me

I just happen to download the new beta from Opera’s website after checking their site out while bored one day (in a waiting room or something, if I recall). What started as a casual, “gee, why don’t I download the Beta and see what small features are new” download turned into an overwhelming experience. The app blew me away, and continues to.

After the typical EULA agreement, the first thing you’ll notice about the app is the presence of the “speed dial” default page that has been present in the Opera desktop browser since God knows when. While I personally don’t get off on the speed dial feature, it is a nice alternative to digging through loads of chronologically-ordered bookmarks.

Another decent feature is the desktop-style Google searchbox. Opera Mini 4′s search box annoyed me with it’s side-scrolling and text input navigation, but this search box is not only better than the Blackberry Browser’s, but is completely identical to that of a regular desktop browser.

While I’m on the subject, Opera has eliminated something that I’m sure has plagued other Opera Mini users for the Blackberry as well: gone are the text-input screens that take up the whole screen area. While this may sound absurd to a normal browser user, Opera Mini 4 had the bad habit of opening text input within a whole new screen, but this has been done away with in Opera Mini 5 beta in favor of a more sane text editing method similar to the Blackberry Browser.

The next thing that impressed me about the new browser was the menu handling – pressing the menu button on my Curve lightly dims the active page and brings down a graphical menu containing the tab bar (more on this in a minute), the address/search bar, and various navigation buttonThs including an additional dropdown menu containing the bookmarks and help links that usually go within a text menu in traditional apps.

But wait, stop there. Read that last paragraph again, and note the reference to the “tab bar” – that’s right, Opera Mini 5 has brought tabbed browsing to the Blackberry! (and other J2ME phones as well)

Opera Mini 5 Introduces Tabbed Browsing For Mobile Devices

No, not that awkward page-thing that comes in Safari for the iPhone – this is actual tabbed browsing, identical to what you see in Firefox/Internet Explorer/Opera, including little animations whenever you move between tabs or add a new one via the “add tab” button!

That blew me away. I am the worst tab-addict on my Firefox instance (there’s always on running), sometimes accumulating up to 25 or more tabs open at once. The ability to accomplish this on my mobile device is now an astounding feature, guaranteeing to tack on an additional 30 minutes to every bathroom trip. I wish I was kidding.

And the memory management doesn’t leave any to be desired, either: if memory becomes scarce and one of your many tabs is found to be the cause of it all, Opera will pick the most memory-intensive tab and close it if it didn’t require any HTTP POST data, and re-open the URL when you switch back to that tab.

Other Notes

While Opera Mini 5 introduces the absolute finest browser chrome ever brought to a mobile platform in my opinion, there are a few extra things that didn’t fit into my Opera love song above, including just a few quirks I feel should be fixed before this is no longer labeled as “beta” (although, like Google, Opera is apparently listing a perfectly fine product as “beta” – or maybe its other organizations that label alpha-quality software as beta too soon, I haven’t a clue)

The Opera rendering engine is fantastic, mainly in that it’s the “standards nazi” of rendering engines. The rendering engine itself is not stored on the mobile device, however: all URL requests are sent to a remote Opera server, which formats the remote URL using the Opera engine into a compressed format which is passed along to the device for interpretation and display.

I like this idea, but the only area which it falls short is JavaScript interpretation. Safari for the iPhone has you beat here, Opera – unless your next revision of the client-side portion of Opera Mini allows for the execution of pre-compiled JavaScript passed from the server’s JavaScript parser, this will always cripple the mobile browser in today’s Web 2.0-crazed Internet.

Also, while I love the new text input mechanism (the old one was horrendous), why does all of my text get deleted whenever I hit backspace/delete twice in a row? It doesn’t just disappear, either: it is pragmatically backspaced as if I held down the delete key, only at a much faster rate. If this is a feature, please remove it or allow us to turn it off/on in the about:config page, because it is simply too annoying.

I also had to bump up my font size to “medium” (although my youthful eyes are perfectly capable of reading “small” font) because the mouse would pass right over links that I wanted to select/click. The mouse, controlled by my scrolling trackball thing, does not smoothly move like that of the Blackberry browser; instead, it makes small jumping motions across the page, and if the font size is set too small, it’ll pass right over a link without highlighting it for interaction.

If these small issues would be fixed or worked out, then I could declare this the perfect mobile browser. As much as I want to go on a rant about how Apple won’t let developers deploy a better browser on their device, or how they won’t allow Sun to port J2ME to the iPhone, I won’t.

…but they still should. Because I think Opera smears Apple in the mobile browsing scene when you compare the two browsers’ chrome and feature set. ‘Nuff said

Oh, and let’s get J2ME-capable Flash ported already!