“Opera Software announced a new and retooled version of their browser in February, and demonstrated it during Mobile World Congress. The Opera browser beta is live in the Play Store. It’s a free download for just about any Android device, so get to it.” The first Opera browser with WebKit.
It’s actually quite fast. I’ve always found Chrome for Android to be a bit laggy but this beta doesn’t lag, even on complex pages.
Sites that look at the user agent-string detects the beta as Chrome 25.
Despite being based on Chrome 25 it doesn’t seem to have the font rendering bug that a lot of android users are suffering from.
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=52248
Other issues are inherited from chrome though, sometimes font sizes are a bit screwy for example.
The UI is almost exactly like Chrome for android but it has a opera-menu and no side-swipe gestures.
Tab switching is annoying and requires three taps (one on the tab-button, one to select a tab and one to maximize it). Why not just put a tab bar on top like doplhin?
It definately seems to be using the Chromium code, as I have found bugs that are only in Chrome, not in the stock browser or WebKit-browsers on iOS.
This is a promising beta. I hope they don’t lag behing Chromium so that when bugs are fixed in Chromium we have to wait a long time for Opera.
So far it is nice and quick. No Link integration yet. Much more Holo like though, even the way you remove the icons from the speedial is like ICS/JB’s launcher.
Gives me hope.
As a long time Opera fan, I’m looking forward to use the new WebKit-based Opera betas in the computers I use.
If Opera replaces its HTML engine and JS engine to WebKit and V8 but they keep all the other functionality (UI, extensions, opera turbo, opera link, dragonfly, etc.) I will be very very satisfied.
Dragonfly is gone (https://twitter.com/runeh/status/301616059729969152)
I’m probably sadder about dragonfly than presto actually.
And we lose another browser.
I’ll stick with Firefox on mobile and all the nice anti web crap add-ons for it.