Opera Mini Makes Me Cringe

The Opera Mini appli­ca­tion was just approved by Apple and hon­estly, I’m dis­ap­pointed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad it was approved and I wel­come com­pe­ti­tion for Mobile Safari. I’m dis­ap­pointed because it looks like no thought was put into Opera Mini’s interface.

The biggest chal­lenge in designing for the iPhone is max­i­mizing screen real estate and this is where my biggest problem with Opera Mini lies. One of its “fea­tures” you will notice imme­di­ately is that the title bar stays vis­ible even as your scroll down the page. Why? It’s a waste of space. Be honest, how often do you need to look at the title of a page when viewing it? Close to never. Safari mobile does a good job of hiding the title as soon as you scroll down the page, why would Opera deviate from this behavior?

The pres­ence of the title bar is made even more annoying by its obnox­ious design. It’s almost as if Opera wanted the title bar to stay vis­ible so that one-sixth of their logo would vis­ible along with it. If somehow we did agree that the bar should stay vis­ible, why would it be made red—a color that will com­pete (and poten­tially clash) with any­thing on the web­site you’re viewing. And to top it all off it’s sep­a­rated by a 2-pixel black stroke and a dark drop shadow.

The only way to hide the title bar is to turn on “full-screen” mode. And in full-screen mode it simply never shows up even if you wanted to see it again. (You have to pre­tend to enter a new URL to get it to pop-up.) Of course, even in full-screen mode you can’t escape that ugly drop shadow.

My prob­lems with Opera Mini’s inter­face don’t end with the title bar, but I’ll keep all the other points brief:

• 
  • Their logo in the top right corner is barely dis­cernible and unnecessary.
  • What does that “rec­om­mend to a friend” button rec­om­mend… and why?
  • The icons in the bottom bar are too cramped.
• 
  • That page icon is unnec­es­sary and old-looking.
  • The “Cancel” button is awk­ward sized and placed and it blends into the bar it’s on!
• 
  • Not only does this not tell me any­thing at first glance, but try using it… it’s a pain.
• 
  • Those icons are tacky and could easily be sim­pli­fied to reduce visual clutter.
  • The active state for the menu but­tons doesn’t read as an active button.
• 
  • The unnec­es­sary icon makes another appearance.
  • Apple has gone to the trouble of designing good looking on/off switches and they were replaced by this? Seriously?
• 
  • And finally… if there was one place that might have ben­e­fited from an extra icon it is right here. A small mag­ni­fying glass inside the find bar would have been extremely helpful.

All of these find­ings are after having only quickly used the appli­ca­tion; I don’t under­stand how the Opera team let some of these things slide. I under­stand that Opera Mini might be faster at loading pages than Safari, and some of the options it pro­vides are very useful, but I really wish they would step up their inter­face design so I wouldn’t have to cringe while using it. What do you guys think?