Opera 14 for Android is out, based on Chromium
my.opera.com
my.opera.com
It lost all my cookies.
Font sizes are all over the place, sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller. It does not render like the desktop anymore. Zooming in, the text is not wrapped to fit the window width (GOD WHY, this feature was fantastic and intuitive, who on earth would not want that and why?) (you can re-enable it in the settings). With text wrapping re-enabled it takes ~10 seconds (I counted on heise.de) to render when I zoom in. On HN it is slightly faster (6-7s).
It does not display the state of downloading in the address bar (or anywhere) anymore so I cannot prematurely stop loading a heavy website when I just want to read text.
There is a second+ delay between clicking the X or refresh icon and the resulting action in the address bar. Same for clicking links in webpages (the indication of what you clicked is much less visible than before).
Overall verdict: Quite unusable on my device because of being very slow. User interface has regressed. This is terrible (and I say that as a Opera fanatic). I am glad I kept a backup of the apk so I can downgrade.
http://arc.opera.com/pub/opera/android/
I downgraded mine promptly. Future doesn't look good though.
If I have a few tabs open I should be able leave the browser, run enough stuff (take a call, play a game, text) to force the browser code to flush from memory, and come back and view the pages I have open without having to endure ANY reloading.
This seems to be a problem with all the android browsers I've tried.
Text wrap off: https://www.dropbox.com/s/at5w97ecle0euwv/2013-05-21%2014.52...
Text wrap on: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ndx19cgmcd823k/2013-05-21%2014.53...
Text wrap on and zoomed in: https://www.dropbox.com/s/s2jsps4vhhdq3rq/2013-05-21%2014.54...
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=84186
Which is pretty amazing, considering how Chrome for Android seems to horribly misrender every other site. I'm almost tempted to switch to Opera thanks to them just adding an option to disable this misfeature, even if losing sync with desktop Chrome will be a bit painful.
I'm disappointed, hopefully this will get fixed in later versions.
Text reflow working is nice though.
I am glad they let users move the navigation bar to the bottom, that is much easier to reach with one hand.
I wish there were site specific preferences like on the desktop version. Being able to block image loading for selected websites or forcing a css mode would greatly reduce my bandwidth costs and increase readability.
A great feature of Opera Mobile is that you can save pages for later offline reading.
And regarding readability:i think opera is the best by far - because it has great reflow on zoom.
Also, on the Play Store publishing page, there are features for beta and alpha testing, not sure what they do, but I feel they are relevant as well.
Sucks for my nook stuck on 2.1, no more updated browser. (I do understand why though, and can't say I blame them).
but since I read that they moving off their own engine to webkit who cares.
Anyone from the Opera team able to provide a reason for this?
Edit: What ewams said. As stated in the article, Opera has restricted tablet-support so far.
This usually only became a problem after a while, after it accrued a bit of history, and local user-data which needs to get searched, cached, updated etc.
To be fair, I've had that problem with lots of browsers, including Chrome.
After reading all the comments on here, I'm pretty sure I won't "upgrade" to their Chrome version anytime soon. It's a shame.
Yay. Because staying in your comfort zone is more important than software diversity.