Opera released the first beta of the next generation of their highly popular web browser Opera Mobile 9.7. The browser boasts a new rendering engine as well as support for widgets. The recent Opera Turbo technology is included as well.
Opera Mobile is one of the most popular browsers, fighting for the top spot with Apples' Mobile Safari, so it's always interesting to see what changes a new version brings.
The new engine is optimized to render pages up to 25% faster and is also the one that will be integrated into the future Opera 10. It scores a perfect 100 out of 100 in the Acid3 test, which tests a browser's compliance with the HTML standard. It still doesn’t guarantee you perfect rendering, but that’s as good as it gets on the browser-side of things.
Opera Mobile 9.7 will come with widgets much like its 9.5 predecessor. Widgets are a powerful feature – add-ons are one of greatest strengths of some of the most popular desktop browsers like Opera and Firefox. The preinstalled widgets on Opera Mobile 9.7 include GeoQuiz, Twitter, Bubbles, MyStatus and Google Translate.
Additionally you can visit Opera Widgets official site to download stuff such as Google Toolbar, VideoDownloader and some less useful, but still fun ones, like 3D Tetris (did you know that June 6th was Tetris 25 year birthday?) or a virtual aquarium.
Since the browser off-loads most of the rendering to Opera's servers the browser will run pretty fast even on low-end phones. The other half of the equation is the server-side compression, which Opera claim can reduce the data that needs to be downloaded up to 80%.
This is obviously a best case scenario, but the compression does help to speed up downloads and better yet – reduce data charges. To demonstrate the technology Opera have "humbly" posted a demo video of Opera Turbo pitting it against Internet Explorer Mobile.
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