Workarounds for Opera Mini

It&#x27;s not the browser which is breaking the site; it&#x27;s the site&#x27;s developers who are using features which are not universally available.<p>Guess what? If you use simple, clean HTML and progressively enhance with JavaScript, CSS and HTML5 features then everyone can browse your site. Or you can use the absolute bleeding edge of everything, requiring every user to give your code a full VM on his machine (a JavaScript VM, granted — but it&#x27;s still a VM), requiring that the user be on the absolute latest and greatest smartphone or highest-end desktop.<p>It&#x27;s up to you.

For many many sites it really doesn&#x27;t matter if they don&#x27;t support 3rd world countries - what value do we gain from working hard to support people with no money to spend? Advertisers aren&#x27;t interested in them, we can&#x27;t sell anything to them. It sounds selfish but society is based on exactly that way of thinking.

&gt;the browser doesn’t support custom fonts using @font-face<p>That&#x27;s a feature and not a bug, as many examples. Opera Mini is is designed to bring you 95% of the web for 20% of the data. This is one trade-off.<p>So are many other things, like CSS-Animations. Opera Mini only displays &quot;frozen&quot; pages and I love it.

&quot;unknown browser&quot;... Always amazed by these bubbled, insulated-firstworld statements. I lived in europe with unlimited mobile bandwidth and regularly used Opera Mini for a combination of leaner&#x2F;quicker navigation and removal of undesirable trackers&#x2F;scripts.<p>Also its offline pages feature is great for travellers and, 3G&#x2F;4G doesn&#x27;t cover 100% of any country.<p>Try to navigate script-heavy sites on these connections and you&#x27;ll quickly realize that opera mini restrictions are desirable features.

My site has a regular Opera Mini user. I don&#x27;t even know how well it works in Opera Mini, but since the user keeps coming back, it probably does. Also I got a Coc Coc [1] user today, which is apparently the second most popular browser in Vietnam. Never heard of it before.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;C%E1%BB%91c_C%E1%BB%91c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;C%E1%BB%91c_C%E1%BB%91c</a>

There is a certain portion of web pundits always banging on about this issue. Progressive enhancement is always the phrase used to beat devs over the head about their use of newfangled technologies.<p>The truth is, there is always going to be some subset of users&#x2F;agents that won&#x27;t be able to use your site. You won&#x27;t reach everyone, not only for technical reasons but for cultural and linguistic reasons as well. Even if you make your stuff work in Opera Mini, who&#x27;s to say the user on the other end reads one of the languages your site is available in.<p>The only thing left is to decide the tradeoff between how many of them, the experience itself, and the amount of work you will spend maximizing the other two. There is something about the web that makes a certain portion of people want to believe that tradeoff doesn&#x27;t exist, and you&#x27;re a jerk if your site doesn&#x27;t work on everyone&#x27;s toaster in Moldova.

&gt;<i>When you’re building websites, front end developers spend countless hours ensuring they gracefully degrade for older browsers, but what about those in developing nations, where every bit and byte counts?</i><p>Well, what about them? Are they realistically going to be your customers?

I had a POS low powered Android phone until sometime last year and Opera Mini was by far the best browser for that phone. The native browser was slow as molasses where Opera Mini was actually snappy. It also had a much better UI and features, some of which are not even on my current browser. For example it&#x27;d send bitmapped fonts over the server so I could read langauges for which there were no fonts on my phone. How they could do that all so fast I have no idea.

Sad times for Opera when Opera Mini is called &#x27;unknown&#x27;

I would use Opera Mini on my old Android because it would be the only somewhat usable browser performance-wise. It is a wonderful browser and it works really well for use cases it was designed for - low-end hardware and low bandwidth limits.<p>What I find useless about it is that they try to give efforts in rendering the designs of the sites and break them instead. I think they should adopt Firefox Reader View&#x27;s approach, that is ditch the design rendering completely and instead focus on displaying only the content and its graphics to the best of its ability.

I used to use it when I used iOS because it was the only alternative browser available and had sane zooming and text wrap features, unlike Safari (at the time, haven&#x27;t used iOS in a while).

I remember a time when opera was supposed to be the browser that implemented web standards the most accurately and completely. What happened? Are they now lagging, or is it just they chose not to support some standards in opera mini for those perfs goals?

Opera been around before chrome even came into picture... Expert trolls not devs...

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