Workarounds for Opera Mini
wtfoperamini.com
wtfoperamini.com
Guess what? If you use simple, clean HTML and progressively enhance with JavaScript, CSS and HTML5 features then everyone can browse your site. Or you can use the absolute bleeding edge of everything, requiring every user to give your code a full VM on his machine (a JavaScript VM, granted — but it's still a VM), requiring that the user be on the absolute latest and greatest smartphone or highest-end desktop.
It's up to you.
Unless you have some new machine learning approach to work out all the platform quirks and arrive at pure fallback nirvana?
It's like expecting the developers of the latest, greatest PC game to write a progressively enhanced game that the same executable will run on DOS 1.0 all the way to the latest Windows version. They will spend time and resources on making sure it works with DOS 1.0, even though there are next to zero users for it, making it completely uneconomical, basically working for free.
Or you can have them click the download Chrome/Firefox link.
-posted using Opera Mini
The trend today is that sites are crashing my up-to-date Firefox browser[1] because they need a ton of Javascript to get the layout right.
I don't mind a fancy site but just let me get the information I need.
[1] I own a not so new smart phone that does the job well for everything else.
As a moderately seasoned developer, I've seen this in my friends too (you know who you are). They get excited by the latest and greatest technology (which is great and they should) and they apply it to their business without first asking themselves if it's actually beneficial (which is bad and they shouldn't).
Most of them come around to "build it simple at first and optimize later", or YAGNI, but in the mean time, we get things like The Next Web.
$5 TNW's next iteration is plain HTML and simple CSS with a minimal amount of JS and they make a big thing out of how performant their site is now, loading instantly, etc. Good job, you discovered Web 1.0 again, but this time with better designers.
> TNW's next iteration … loading instantly
Games aren't a fair comparison; very few sites are anything like games, and gaming has always been pushing the boundaries of technology.
A more favourable comparison would be shipping a "content reader app", based on Windows Metro APIs, when a plaintext file would do just fine (and would work on MSDOS 1.0, if it were ASCII).
I already make compact web sites compared to my peers -- no jQuery, optimized images, mostly text-driven. No JS is required to navigate and view the site. A hair over 100 kb for most of sites, including blog and header image. I use global CDNs. So my sites are friendly to users in developing countries, as long as they don't use Opera Mini.
There's nothing "bleeding edge" about supporting JS and CSS that IE8 supports. That's as low as I'm going, and no guilt about it.
By the way, have you actually tested any of your sites on Opera Mini? You may be surprised at just how poorly it renders, unless you're still working with tables.
Our company sell to developing countries too, and there's definitely money to be made.
If you don't want to support people who you automatically assume have no money to spend, go ahead and leave it on the table for us to collect. :)
With the advent of the $30 smartphone, by the time these countries have disposable income that you can indirectly or directly profit from, its likely that one of their first purchases is a better phone with a capable browser. Until then they're a waste of time and resources.
On Black Friday you could get a Moto E, unlocked and off contract, for $10. This phone has a quad core processor, an LTE radio, a gig of ram, and a 5 megapixel camera. Ten dollars gets you something that can outperform flagships from 2 years ago.
But even putting that aside, you're ignoring the fact that as these developing nations develop and have money that's worth going after, bandwidth is certainly going to become cheaper as well.
Opera Mini doesn't render webpages, it's all done server side. What's sent to the browser is a pile of highly compressed layers containing text and images and some metadata about what's clickable - and that's it. From HTML, JS and CSS point of view Opera Mini is a highly optimized, non-real time remote desktop client.
I've heavily used J2ME Opera Mini on my S40 dumbphones many years ago. Back then it was awesome. Today, when the only way to keep sanity when browsing the web on desktop is using NoScript, I doubt that using it would be as awesome as it was back then, and that's not really Opera Mini fault. After all, when using Opera Mini, you don't expect everything to work and render as it would on desktop browser - as long as content is shown and can be accessed properly, it's fine. However, in a world where crazy people use SPA frameworks for their blogs, it cannot be taken for granted.
If a business doesn't care about users in developing countries, that's their call. I don't think either way is wrong but the front-end people should at least raise the issue and then go with what the client needs. So many websites target a relatively small geographic area that they can safely ignore Opera Mini users and continue to thrive.
Not really. They might be perusing your e.g. news site for information, but wouldn't click in any ad anyway (and maybe, because of Opera Mini, they don't even see them).
Back then I figured: when when you are architecturally forced to throw out compliance with lots of fancy newfangled dynamic stuff, why not focus on readability and page navigation usability instead?
(I led the Opera Mini team at Opera until last year.)
Why haven't anybody managed to copy that feature well?
That's a feature and not a bug, as many examples. Opera Mini is is designed to bring you 95% of the web for 20% of the data. This is one trade-off.
So are many other things, like CSS-Animations. Opera Mini only displays "frozen" pages and I love it.
Also its offline pages feature is great for travellers and, 3G/4G doesn't cover 100% of any country.
Try to navigate script-heavy sites on these connections and you'll quickly realize that opera mini restrictions are desirable features.
The truth is, there is always going to be some subset of users/agents that won't be able to use your site. You won't reach everyone, not only for technical reasons but for cultural and linguistic reasons as well. Even if you make your stuff work in Opera Mini, who's to say the user on the other end reads one of the languages your site is available in.
The only thing left is to decide the tradeoff between how many of them, the experience itself, and the amount of work you will spend maximizing the other two. There is something about the web that makes a certain portion of people want to believe that tradeoff doesn't exist, and you're a jerk if your site doesn't work on everyone's toaster in Moldova.
Well, what about them? Are they realistically going to be your customers?
What I find useless about it is that they try to give efforts in rendering the designs of the sites and break them instead. I think they should adopt Firefox Reader View's approach, that is ditch the design rendering completely and instead focus on displaying only the content and its graphics to the best of its ability.
When you request a page in opera mini, that request is sent to Opera's servers. The webpage is rendered on their server [using their rendering engine], and a totally different (OBML) file is sent to your browser, to represent the end result.
'Mini' never sees HTML, Javascript or CSS -- those are handled on the server. This allows the browser to use dramatically less bandwidth... but creates some major limitations.
Opera still makes 'normal' browsers -- and at least in the iOS version, the 'Mini' mode can be switched off [making it render the same as any webkit browser.]
I Think they either have plans to, or have already transitioned to using webkit/blink as the backend for Mini.
Never mind that they seem to be doing their level best to kill of the presto-era browsers. This December they shut down their bookmark sync service (Opera Link) after having introduced a new one for their webkit/blink based browsers.
It sometimes seems like the web is heading for yet another monoculture. Marginally better than the IE era as this time the engine is open source, but a monoculture non the less.
Yep, it will provide web access over a crappy EDGE connection using a feature phone.
As for the larger Opera, what happened was Google Chrome. There was no way a small for profit like Opera could keep up. So they caved, and now their desktop and non-mini mobile offerings are Chromium based.