socialrosiechen: Opera Mini 5.1 for Android released, put to the test against desktop Chrome (video)

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Opera Mini 5.1 for Android released, put to the test against desktop Chrome (video)

Opera Mini 5.1 for Android has been released -- visit m.opera.com, or simply search for 'Opera' on Android Market. This is only a minor patch, but it should be both faster and easy to use. Mini can now also be set as your default browser -- about time!

Anyway, without any real way to benchmark Opera Mini 5 against other mobile browsers, I decided to pit it against a desktop browser -- Chrome 6, to be exact. Watch the video; be impressed! Opera Mini certainly isn't as fast as a desktop computer -- but then again, what mobile browser is? Also, bear in mind that I'm using a very high-speed Internet connection. On a crippled '2G' or Wi-Fi link, the difference between Mini and Chrome would be far smaller -- Opera's compression technology only really shines when there is limited bandwidth available.

Still, you can see that Opera Mini makes an excellent replacement for the default Android browser. There's no reason why you shouldn't use Opera Mini 5, put it that way.

Now I need to find some way of artificially limiting my bandwidth so that I can see if Opera Mini is actually faster than desktop Chrome!