I had the pleasure of being stuck in traffic during my drive home last Thursday, so knowing that the 2nd beta of Opera Mini 4 was available to download, I downloaded it onto my RAZR.

Right off-the-bat, my experience was a positive one. The initial tutorial was very helpful, giving me a quick overview of all the new features and the best ways to navigate around the web pages I would visit. I also noticed I didn’t need to enter a sequence of random characters before using the browser, something I had had to do in the past with older versions of Opera Mini.

Once I had moved beyond the setup, I was at the main landing page, ready to start browsing the web. My first destination would be the Washington State Department of Transportation website, as I needed to figure out what was giving me all this free time in my car to play around with a mobile web browser. Now, I know there’s a version of the site made specifically for small devices, but where’s the fun in that? Afterall, I wanted to get a feel for how the latest beta performs browsing the real web.

There’s good news and bad news when it comes to browsing web pages using Opera Mini 4 Beta 2. The good news is, if you’re browsing web pages with which you’re familiar and at which you spend a lot of time even when you’re not mobile (e.g. when you’re at home browsing in Firefox or Opera), navigating the web will be a piece of cake. When you first land at any page, you’re presented with a high-level, out-of-focus view of the entire page. If you know where you want to go, you simply scroll your cursor to that section of the page and then click to dive down to the content. It doesn’t get a whole lot easier than that.

The bad news, at least from my perspective, is that if you aren’t intimately familiar with the web page you’re viewing, it’s pretty much a crapshoot to figure out where you want to dive down. Take, for instance, the Washington State Department of Transportation website (what a convenient example!). I’ve included a screenshot of what that site looks like in Opera Mini 4 Beta 2:

Opera Mini Beta 2 Screenshot

Because I don’t spend a lot of time at the site’s home page (unfortunately I do spend a lot of time at their map, thanks to Seattle’s traffic woes) and don’t recall the URLs of the specific sections of the site I want to see, I’m forced to literally guess at where on the page the links I’m interested in might sit. As you can guess from the screenshot, this isn’t a straightforward process.

If you combine the aforementioned guessing game with the fact that sometimes the browser seems to hang up a bit (I think this is more likely due to my slow data connection than the browser itself), it can literally take a few minutes to navigate a single page trying to find the content in which you’re interested. That being said, it should be mentioned that other mobile browsers simply toss you to the top of the page and force you to work your way down through all of the page’s content in search of that very same content. Is the Opera Mini 4 Beta 2 release better when this is taken into consideration? Of course. If you have any expertise in browsing the web (and most people do these days), your chances of guessing the spot on the page that contains the content you’re after is probably a lot higher than stumbling upon it within a few clicks in another mobile browser.

Other things to note about the latest beta include the support for landscape mode and the “create search” functionality. My RAZR’s screen is taller than it is wide, so it was interesting to be able to flip web pages on their side and view them in landscape mode. It does take some getting used to, though, as the soft keys end up being “top and bottom” buttons instead of “left and right.” The “create search” functionality sounds promising. I haven’t used it yet, but it sounds like I could take the search box at my personal blog and add it as a custom search option in Opera Mini 4 Beta 2. That way, I could search for something like “Opera Mini” and get a list of all posts I’ve made at my blog about the mobile browser. Pretty cool!

For more on the Beta 2 release of Opera Mini 4, be sure to read the changelog. If you’re interested in how your site or any other site will look in the latest beta release, you can test that out over at the Opera Mini 4 beta simulator. And if you’ve had a chance to play with Opera Mini 4 Beta 2 and have your own feedback, please post a comment. I’d love to hear about it.

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