Slightly ajar

Opera Mini 4 beta has just been released. The main new features include a desktop-like overview mode similar to the Internet Channel for Nintendo Wii, a more powerful upgraded browser engine from the Core-2 Kestrel family and full support for Handheld stylesheets and CSS3 Media Queries (for the media types applicable for phones).

The new desktop-like view reformats the page to fit the screen width, and uses a virtual mouse pointer, and overview thumbnail that shows where the page will zoom into. The user can choose low or high quality images to either save bandwidth on slow costly connections or have a higher quality experience when using WiFi or unlimited data plans. The existing small screen rendering mode is also still available for users that prefer this mode and want to avoid horizontal scrolling and zooming to read the text. This option is currently called Fit-to-width.

The improved standards support and full respect for handheld stylesheets and media queries make Opera Mini 4 much better for web developers. Any layout can be fully customisable using these web standards technologies, to optimise for the mobile experience. Previously, Opera Mini 3 used to apply small screen rendering over the top of handheld stylesheets. A layout designed using handheld styelsheets and/or media queries should now display the same on both Opera Mini and Opera Mobile. We hope other browsers will follow suit in supporting handheld stylesheets, but media queries should already be available on iPhone and Nokia S60 browsers.

As can be seen on the features page, Opera Mini is a fast browser that compresses the pages to save bandwidth, likely beating out the much more hyped browser from another company that will be launched soon. Mini 4 shows the longs experience Opera has in building browsers for mobile and resource constraint devices, and the power of the Core-2 engine. I personally think the guys and girls in Sweden did a great job with this browser so far. By the time of the full release it should be even better. One issue to look out for in this beta is that SSL security is not switched on, so don't test this with secure pages like your bank. This feature will be switched back on in the final release.