Haavard

Wap Review: The Truth About Opera Mobile 10 Memory Usage

Thursday, 5. November 2009, 10:00:00

opera mobile, opera mobile 10, wap review, mobile, memory

I have noticed some comments wondering about the allegedly high memory usage in the Opera Mobile 10 beta, and while I am sure there will be further optimizations before the final versions, I also think some people have somewhat unrealistic expectations.

We should all keep in mind that Opera Mobile is a standalone browser with a full browser engine. It has to download and handle the full page itself, unlike Opera Mini, where our servers do all the heavy lifting.

Incidentally, Wap Review has written up a brief analysis of memory usage in Opera Mobile 10, as a response to an article posted by GoMo News called "Memory problem dogs new Opera Mobile browser".

Their conclusion is that the GoMo News article should have been titled "Memory problem dogs old Nokia N95-1", and they also seem to agree with me on what is required of a modern browser:

The bottom line is that the new generation of advanced mobile browsers require lots of memory

Unfortunately, Opera Mobile 10 will probably never run comfortably on some phones because they simply do not have enough memory to handle the kind of browser required to display modern Web pages. This is not necessarily because Opera Mobile is bloated or requires too much memory. It is simply because the technologies used on the Web today require an extremely advanced browser engine to work. And complexity leads to higher memory requirements.

But again, I'm sure our developers will work on further optimizations, so that Opera Mobile runs on as many phones as possible.

Where's the Flash support in Opera Mobile 10 for Symbian S60?Cenzic says Firefox and Safari are the least secure browsers? Really?

Comments

persianweblog # 5. November 2009, 11:18

tomassplatch # 5. November 2009, 11:45

good explanation, hopefully it would calm down some of the criticism. Opera is very swift on my E51, I get memory error sometimes however, especially when browsing complex pages. But that's the price to pay for a full featured browser.

ZAHEK # 5. November 2009, 12:49

No any problem for E63 as well..

lwiczek # 5. November 2009, 15:11

Simple question -- will Opera Mobile 10 (for WinMo) require same amount as current version (9.7)? For the moment I can't use Opera Mobile on my phone (htc tytn I) because immediately after loading any page I get an error saying that there is not sufficient amount of memory...
Opera Mini 5 looks superb on my phone tho, and I wouldn't mind using it but it lacks opera link

rafaelluik # 5. November 2009, 16:11

Opera Mobile Turbo only compress the images like in the desktop version or does it uses an Opera Mini server?

haavard # 5. November 2009, 16:30

Opera Turbo compresses images and text. I think Opera Turbo for mobiles is the same as the desktop version.

I don't know anything about system requirements for 9.5 vs. 10.0, unfortunately.

thobi # 5. November 2009, 18:33

i know, your blog is not the right place to discuss memory/opera mobile issues, but as you brought it up (and with all due respect), i don't think that a nokia 5800xm is an old phone. but proof me wrong. and i think some slight improvement is necessary (i know, it's a beta and i'm using betas and weeklies long enough

). but i believe in you(r) guys

perhaps you'll find some possibilities to reduce memory usage and perhaps a solution to handle situations of memory leaks (like messages "memory is low. do you want to close a tab to gain new ressources?" or "memory is low. a new tab should not be opened. do you still want to open it?"). donno. just the first thoughts i came up with.

thx haavard

haavard # 5. November 2009, 19:11

From what I can tell, the 5800 works fine. According to this post that phone has been tested without any problems.

Maybe you are running a lot of applications in the background or something.

thobi # 5. November 2009, 19:22

well, you know my ram-situation as it's mentioned in my forums post. but after it worked fine the first 2 times it looks like 50% of the time it's just too much for my phone

ps: i do restart my phone at least once a day

Chas4 # 6. November 2009, 05:15

Also there is the difference in what Opera Mini and Opera Mobile run on, regular phones vs smart phones

53north # 7. November 2009, 22:47

To muddy the waters even more, operamini5beta has started working like a dream here on an older Nokia j2me. Must be optimizing the serving. Full blog page loads at 32Kb..
=o)

eldi # 10. November 2009, 06:37

I also have the memory problem with Opera Mobile on my 5800. When just a single tab is open no problem, but second tab cause the low memory warning. And at the moment I'm not running application on background, I've reseted to factory settings just before installing Opera and haven't installed anything else.