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Adrian Lee

With Opera Mini spreading, and other mobile browsers likely to head in the same direction (because of it’s popularity and the rave reviews people have made about it’s usefulness), I can’t see that coding specific sites for other ‘devices’ is a long term effort worth investing in.

I’ve compared opening one of our own web sites on my Opera Mini installed phone, and a colleagues old style mobile browser.
Opera mini opened the full site fine. Some tweaks could be made to make it mroe friendly, but the site worked, you could navigate, view content etc…. And that was version 1 of Opera Mini.
Colleagues phone…. well, that never got to actually opening the site, it’s memory got full and crashed….

So which is better, a mobile browser that can open most sites already out there (and can even utilise a certain amount of Javascript, though that’s apparently a proper battery drainer) or one that needs specially crafted ‘lite’ web sites which are never going to get the same attention as the main site (same reason text-only versions of sites for accessibility aren’t a good idea).

With the DS and the Wii both having Opera as the browser to use, they are in similar boats, and as usual, I’m sure other browser manufacturers will copy what Opera’s been upto.