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Comment by stanleydrew | Hacker News Reader

Does the Opera browser app itself not interpret javascript? Is it offloaded to the iPhone's WebKit/rendering engine? Otherwise this would seem to fly in the face of the recent change to 3.3.1.

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Think of Opera Mini as an interactive image viewer. They interpret all JavaScript on the server side and sent result back to the client using OBML[1]. Or at least that's how it works on other device.

  [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini#Functionality

Interesting. The section on JavaScript support is not encouraging actually. Can anyone report on attempting to use a js-heavy web-app through Opera Mini, e.g. Gmail?

It's not great at AJAX. My brother has a Blackberry and mainly uses Opera, and the fact that Sporcle(.com) worked on my iPhone shocked him. Apparently Opera can't do onchange.

Gmail just gives the normal HTML mobile version, like it did in the bad old days before iPhone.

I just tested, and sporcle.com works well on Symbian. Does blackberry have it's own version of opera too?

From my experience with Opera Mini in Windows Mobile (since it's still not available in App Store), Gmail just fallback to the Basic HTML mode. It's safe to assume most JavaScript-heavy web apps won't going to work at all.

Even Opera on the desktop doesn't work so hot with Gmail.

huh? yes it does. I use it every day and it works great.

Every time I vote up a comment the page reloads and starts at the top.

The app is Opera Mini, not Opera Mobile, so no, it does not. Opera Mini is a proxy browser: all the heavy lifting, including JavaScript and most rendering, happens on one of Opera's proxy servers. The Opera Mini app receives a heavily pre-processed and compressed version of the webpage, in some custom data format. The app itself only does rendering, not processing or interpreting.

No, the Opera app does not run JavaScript itself. The app communicates to Opera's server, and it's the server that does HTTP with the website, runs the JavaScript, and compresses the HTML and sends it down to the app.

The restriction on downloading and executing code has been in the developer agreement since the beginning. It's not a recent thing.

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