Notices

I disagree. There are times when Opera Mini is the perfect browser based on your connection.

While Opera Mobile is a fine browser when the connection is good (3G/WiFi), it suffers when on 2G connections. Even Turbo mode does not help when dealing with content heavy pages.
The reason for this is the page is rendered on the device (html/javascript/images etc) . Turbo mode helps by compressing the images on opera's servers first, but the image is loaded by the page the same way.

Opera Mini can load the page quick (minus some functionality) because the ENTIRE page is rendered on opera's servers first, then sent as a single file to the Mini browser to be displayed.. and the size difference is huge so it transfers quick on a slow connection due to it's tiny size.. so when I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere on a one bar 2G connection, I have a way of getting help without waiting forever.
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I know as a community we have managed to run Mini on J2SE within a J2ME emulator, and it has worked so far. But it has the overhead of a VM within a VM to get it to work so it tends to eat the battery.

Thats why I was hoping the Devs at Opera Labs would consider making a Maemo native version of Opera Mini, as they have done so already for iPhone and Android..

The N900 is a versatile device - moreso than others, and Opera Mini deserves a place on it.

i suspect what you see with the 2G is the extra round trip delay. both 3G (UMTS), and now 4G (LTE) have decreased the latency vs 2G. I suspect that opera mobile is not applying any kind of pipelining (basically reusing a single http connection to send multiple page elements), especially when turbo is enabled, and so each element of the page that needs to be downloaded is its own http connection. Each connection needs to be negotiated and each will be affected by the extra latency of 2G compared to 3G.

heck, it may even be beneficial to disable turbo under such conditions if it can lead to use of pipelining and therefor decrease the need to set up connections.

but this is all speculation.

As some of you may have noticed, the S60 team at Opera released a beta build of Opera Mobile 10.1 today. I am glad to announce that we have also been busy updating the Maemo version to the latest Opera Mobile 10.1 code, so today I have pushed a new build to the extras-testing repository (extras-devel for the N800/N810 build).

Please report bugs and leave comments on the stability of this release. Once we are satisfied that there are no major regressions or stability issues we will push it to our own repositories and extras.

Here is a short changelog for this build:
- Geolocation support.
- Javascript JIT support.
- Fix garbage display after rotation due to incorrect stride.
- Fix monospaced font in UI elements.
- Fix display of Asian fonts in UI elements.
- More efficient socket handling, decreases CPU usage slightly.
- Suspend JavaScript, animations etc. when screen saver activates.
- Reduced tearing while panning.
- Fix proxy server mixup.
- Fix crash when reading proxy settings.
- Upgraded Opera Core, including many bugfixes
- Many bugfixes to the UI

Known issues:
- Somewhat higher memory usage, especially on JavaScript intensive sites.
- Due to timing issues with different geolocation information providers (WiFi, cell towers, GPS) first request may have poor precision.
- Fast scrolling not optimized for page rendering.
- Adobe Flash and other plugins are not supported.
- Screen tearing may be visible when panning, especially in portrait mode.
- The built-in on-screen keyboard is not supported. Use the physical keyboard or the on screen keyboard included with Opera Mobile.

For a "lefthand project" of the Opera team, I'm really diggin' this level of support for the Opera browser on Maemo!

-b

Some extra things I forgot:
- if you run opera from a command-line with --no-suspend, it won't suspend when the screen blanks. This is useful when benchmarking.
- if you enable "other notifications" in the N900 settings->notification light, the notification light will blink while opera is loading pages.

ironic given that nokia have walked away from the 800 series.

Not seeing this happen after upgrading mine

Sorry, I wasn't very clear in my description of this. Like all(?) other notifications, it will only blink if the screen is turned off.

Ah, that's got it -

This is imho hands down so much better than using other browsers on my N900.

Will plug-ins such as Flash ever be enabled or is that beyond what will happen for this port?

bah, still seems to think the 800 screen is 1024 or something.