Introduction

With the popularity of Android, a vast number of people have been waiting with great anticipation to get a taste of Android version 4: Ice Cream Sandwich. For tablet fans, January 2012 saw great news. At the 2012 CES conference, the first tablet running Android ICS was unveiled by MIPS. And side by side with this, Opera has been working with MIPS to bring the highest possible quality browsing experience to the new breed of MIPS-based devices.

Amit Rohatgi — MIPS Principal Architect, Mobile — gave the following comment in support of the cooperative work:

As web content becomes more rich and interactive, the browser has been evolving quite rapidly. More than ever, web designers are challenged by adhering to new standards, new programming tools, and new end target devices. End users, as a result, have an expectation of how web pages need to be rendered, how fast they can be displayed, and how protected they are when browsing. In addition, intuitive management of information using tabs, a download manager, and competitive searching are all important to the end-user for maximum data consumption.

For many years now, Opera has been known for speed, size and compliance to standards. In benchmarks, reports show that it consistently performs, retains a small footprint, and is usually the first to be compliant with Acid tests.

MIPS Technologies believes in promoting a rich ecosystem in the application processor space — providing access to the best content available to the end user. Without a doubt, Opera fits that bill. The combination of MIPS’ elegant CPU architecture design and Opera’s efficient browser engine results in a compelling end user experience. The highly skilled engineering team at Opera brought their amazing browser to MIPS in record time, and it's great to see it available to the world. MIPS and Opera will continue to work together, innovating to bring the best user experience on the internet to end users.

Introducing Opera 12 for MIPS Android devices

We are proud to present you with a working Labs version of Opera Mobile 12 for Android devices running on MIPS architecture. This has all the features of our regular Android Opera Mobile:

• Leading support for modern web standards, including
  • A comprehensive set of CSS3 and HTML5 features
  • WebGL
  • getUserMedia
  • Device APIs
• A JIT-enabled JavaScript processor
• No checker-boarding effect
• Butter smooth scrolling

Download

To install this experimental Opera 12 build, browse your MIPs Android device to Opera 12 for MIPS Android devices.

Chris Mills

Chris Mills is a web technologist, open standards evangelist and education agitator, currently working at Opera Software in the developer relations team. He spends most of his time writing articles about web standards for dev.opera.com and other publications (such as .net mag and A List Apart), giving talks at universities and industry conferences, and lobbying universities to improve their web education courses. He believes that education is the answer to everything, but in particular he is passionate about using education to improve the overall content quality, accessibility, usability and future-viability of the Web. He is the creator of the Opera Web standards curriculum, contributor to the WaSP InterACT project, and coauthor of InterACT with web standards: A Holistic Approach to Web Design. In August 2011, he also accepted the position of co-chair of the newly-formed Web Education Community Group. Outside work he is a heavy metal drummer, proud father of three and lover of good beer.