Opera Mobile 10.1 beta for Android is here

November 9, 2010 · by Andreas Bovens

We've just released our first version of Opera Mobile for Android — you can get it from m.opera.com. It comes packed with features and standards support, with more things under way. A quick overview.

Pinch zoom and text wrap

Unlike earlier Opera Mobile versions for other platforms, this release has support for pinch zoom, and a handy automatic text-wrap feature to go with it. The latter allows us to preserve the layout of the page upon initial display, while focusing on readability upon zooming in: no need to scroll from left to right to read long sentences. Be sure to play around with the various text-wrap settings (default is "on tap"), and let us know what works best for you.

Vega and Carakan

Opera Mobile 10.1 for Android has Vega and Carakan (without JIT) support, which means it has support for CSS3 features such as border-radius, box-shadow and 2D transforms, as well as fast JavaScript.

Touch events and viewport

We've added support for touch events, and have revisited our meta viewport implementation to make it more robust. One of the improvements is that if you use a viewport value such as e.g. <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"> (our recommended setting for cross-device compatibility), the page content will automatically fit inside the available screen width at any zoom level setting (e.g. 160% by default on my HTC Desire).

SVG, Geolocation and more

Opera Mobile 10.1 beta for Android has extensive support for SVG — in fact, it is the first browser on the Android Store to do so —, the Geolocation API, and more. Web fonts support is currently disabled, but we expect to enable it for the final release, and hope to add support for things like Web Storage, Application Cache, and so on.

User agent string

The UA string for this release is as follows:

Opera/9.80 (Android; Linux; Opera Mobi/ADR-1011081433; U; en) Presto/2.5.28 Version/10.1

As always, browser sniffing comes with a number of caveats, as it is likely to exclude certain platforms and models, so only use it if really necessary. We recommend using a combined approach of feature detection and progressive enhancement instead.

Debugging

Hot on the heels of this release for Android, we'll be releasing an update to the Opera Mobile emulator, so you can run and test in the same browser from the comfort of your PC or Mac. Expect more about this in the weeks to come!

And for those who haven't tried out Opera Dragonfly's remote debugging capabilities with Opera Mobile: be sure to give it a spin with this Android release. The Scope protocol version inside this Opera Mobile release has been upgraded to STP-1, so debugging is much faster than in previous Opera Mobile versions.

So, that's a wrap. Let us know what you think!

Readers' comments 30

Left under the original article, as archived.

Pallab DeTuesday, November 9, 2010 7:49:17 AM
Will JIT support be enabled in the final release of Opera Mobile 10.1?
AuxTuesday, November 9, 2010 9:00:32 AM
The only problem is scrolling. I will make a video today detailing the issue. Otherwise this beta is awesome! A bit slow, but great anyway!
SteveTuesday, November 9, 2010 9:10:52 AM
I don't see the download link, I assume that means you don't support 1.6?
Spadar ShutTuesday, November 9, 2010 9:20:20 AM
Widgets don't work yet?
Unregistered userTuesday, November 9, 2010 9:25:39 AM
Per writes: plunx make it listen to the browser-intent, like Opera Mini does. I want to make it my standard browser on the phone.
tomasbTuesday, November 9, 2010 9:55:05 AM
Originally posted by Steve:

I don't see the download link, I assume that means you don't support 1.6?

I might be released later. (If users will ask for it)
Andreas BovensTuesday, November 9, 2010 10:00:14 AM
Steve, what phone are you using?
ouzowtfTuesday, November 9, 2010 10:08:36 AM
Text-wrap set as 'auto' works better for me, because after text-wrap I can zoom in again to increase the font size and text wraps again too. Therefore texts are easier to read for me.
When its set to 'On tap' I only have one zoom level of wrapped text and when I zoom again, text is not wrapped again, so I have to scroll while reading a text.
But text-wrap seems to be quite slow.

On several news pages I read that people are complaining about the size on disk and ressource usage beeing quite high. Will there be some optimisations in the future?

(Motorola Milestone)

//edit: Ahh, now I understand. Set to 'On tap' I have to tap every time manually if I want text-wrap on a specific zoom level. I thought I only have to activate it once and then text will be wrapped automatically on every zoom level, except on 100%.
Mağruf ÇolakoğluTuesday, November 9, 2010 10:29:49 AM
Thanks
SteveTuesday, November 9, 2010 12:37:04 PM
Originally posted by andreasbovens:

Steve, what phone are you using?

HTC Magic
Unregistered userTuesday, November 9, 2010 2:02:44 PM
Anonymous writes: Why does this app request the permission to dial premium rate numbers upon installation? i don't want my browser to make calls, it can open the android dialer app if needed or i can copy/paste a number from a web page.
Khaled KhalilWednesday, November 10, 2010 12:49:42 AM
i would like to ask if those new features that have only seen light in this beta, will they be available later for other platforms beside Android ? Symbian eh?

Originally posted by ouzoWTF:

I read that people are complaining about the size on disk and ressource usage beeing quite high. Will there be some optimisations in the future?

i second ouzowtf, that's a real concern for some devices.
Cutting SpoonWednesday, November 10, 2010 6:35:38 AM
Forwarding this to a group of Android-browser haters...being as they couldn't use Mini for certain websites either. Hope this helps them.
prd3Wednesday, November 10, 2010 11:23:38 AM
Originally posted by anonymous:

Why does this app request the permission to dial premium rate numbers upon installation?

It doesn't. It needs permission to follow phone links in web pages to make calls if you click a link like that.

i don't want my browser to make calls, it can open the android dialer app if needed or i can copy/paste a number from a web page.

The browser doesn't make calls. The browser gets permission to open the dialer for you, so that you won't have to copy and paste manually.
prd3Wednesday, November 10, 2010 11:24:15 AM
Originally posted by Khaled-Khalil:

i second ouzowtf, that's a real concern for some devices.

You can't expect a full browser to take up no space whatsoever.
Unregistered userWednesday, November 10, 2010 1:07:08 PM
Matt writes: A couple of things I'd add... When you go to Full Screen, the bottom task bar disappears until you press the Menu key, while on standard view its always there. I would add an option to have it behave the same as it does in full screen mode. the ability to tie into the Share functionality of Android would be great - I often share links via facebook, twitter and Gmail, and would love to be able to do so without having to copy & paste the link. other than that...rather impressive.
Unregistered userWednesday, November 10, 2010 3:00:45 PM
Anonymous writes: if one clicks on a phone number, does opera open the dialer with the number, i.e. presents the ready-to-dial number waiting for the user to press the green button or does it actually start the dialing, i.e. initiates a call without the user confirming that he wanted to dial that number at all?
Andreas BovensWednesday, November 10, 2010 3:23:28 PM
Opera will open the dialer with the number - the user has to confirm he wants to call by pressing the green button. You can try it out here: http://people.opera.com/andreasb/tc/tel/tel.html
bjhamltnWednesday, November 10, 2010 5:39:33 PM
Will JIT support be enabled in the final release of Opera Mobile 10.1?
Andreas BovensThursday, November 11, 2010 12:46:23 AM
We're working on enabling it, yes.
Unregistered userThursday, November 11, 2010 8:17:22 PM
Anonymous writes: can flash/webm support be expected in an upcoming version?
Unregistered userWednesday, November 17, 2010 1:24:21 PM
JGJones writes: I love Opera Mobile - however the biggest issue is the installation size. I understand that as a full standalone browser, it is going to take up some size. The total size overall is about 30.16MB - which leave me with about 10MB of free space on my Nexus One. However since Opera Mobile does support move to SD this shouldn't be an issue so I chose to do this. Move to SD and the installed size is now 23.53MB - I've saved 6.47MB of space which isn't that much really and I continue to get a low space warning which is a bit annoying. I'm not complaining since I understand that it's a beta product, but I thought I would mention that Fennec (Firefox for Android) also had the same installation problem and they solved it in the recent build so that a much larger bulk get transferred over to SD using linked libraries I think. It might be worthwhile for Opera to check out their solution to give them ideas. 23.53MB is still big for a Nexus One. The last issue - will Flash be supported on Opera Mobile? But for a beta product, it's awesome and I love it and I look forward to further improvement as you get closer to the final build.
Unregistered userSaturday, November 27, 2010 9:22:11 PM
Анонимно writes: I have the same problem with free space, even worse. After 1,5 weeks of using Opera mobile, it increased in size from 26mb to 45!!! I have XPERIA X10 mini pro, so it has not much memory in stock, and this situation is critical for me. 26 mb is program itself (I can stand it, but hope the final release would be smaller in size), and 19mb is something, called "data", which is stored also in internal memory of smartphone and increases every day! Cache is 0, I choosed to empty it on exit in "opera:config" Actually, I tryed all the settings there, but haven't found where this strange "data" is stored and how to delete it, or move it to SD card... I realy like the browser, but in this situation I should reinstall it every week, to empty some free space - it's crazy thing, you know...
Unregistered userSaturday, November 27, 2010 9:23:46 PM
Анонимно writes: I have the same problem with free space, even worse. After 1,5 weeks of using Opera mobile, it increased in size from 26mb to 45!!! I have XPERIA X10 mini pro, so it has not much memory in stock, and this situation is critical for me. 26 mb is program itself (I can stand it, but hope the final release would be smaller in size), and 19mb is something, called "data", which is stored also in internal memory of smartphone and increases every day! Cache is 0, I choosed to empty it on exit in "opera:config" Actually, I tryed all the settings there, but haven't found where this strange "data" is stored and how to delete it, or move it to SD card... I realy like the browser, but in this situation I should reinstall it every week, to empty some free space - it's crazy thing, you know...
Unregistered userSunday, November 28, 2010 4:00:25 PM
Anonymous writes: I have reservations about installing apps that require odd permissions. The CALL_PHONE permission someone alluded to earlier is described by the android developer documentation as follows: "Allows an application to initiate a phone call without going through the Dialer user interface for the user to confirm the call being placed." No permissions are required to initiate the dialer interface... the permission is required to bypass the dialer and user confirmation to make phone calls. I shall not recommend Opera Mobile to people while it still requires this permission.
Unregistered userFriday, December 10, 2010 5:25:05 PM
Ivan writes: It only show Opera Mobile and that all. no error message or anythings. Dell Streak, Android 2.1-update1 Can't to test it...any snapshot version ? Thanks
Unregistered userThursday, February 17, 2011 1:10:06 PM
kyoge writes: Im having a problem here... when I select facebook it stucks at loading 0B. Im using N85 Smart.Really need help.
Unregistered userThursday, February 17, 2011 1:36:49 PM
dsingh writes: atleast give setting to disable pinch to zoom in mobile view what do u want it for ? it makes problem while surfing.
mrwong18Monday, February 13, 2012 6:31:22 AM
well i`m wondering why there`s no exit bottom for android(both mini and mobile) but the Chinese ver called "欧鹏" in Chinese name, the same thing as the opera mobile had a exit bottom？
Mağruf ÇolakoğluMonday, February 13, 2012 11:22:31 AM
We are waiting Turkish support.