Opera Mobile emulator and Opera Mini simulator

At the very least checking that your site looks and works ok in a mobile browser is becoming part of the job for most web professionals. Tweaking things a bit for mobile by using Media Queries or even making a separate, “optimised”, site is also more common now than a year or two ago.

The problem is checking your work in mobile browsers. It seems like “everybody” has an iPhone and/or an iPad these days (except me), so Safari for iOS is pretty easy for most developers to check in. But what about other mobile browsers?

Other mobile browsers? Yep, there are other smartphones than the iPhone, which Peter-Paul Koch goes into detail about in Smartphone Browser Landscape. There are many other browsers and platforms, and even though many mobile browsers are based on WebKit they don’t all behave exactly the same.

So you’ll want to test on something more than Safari for iOS. And that brings me to the title of this post. For testing Opera Mobile and Opera Mini you don’t have to buy an additional phone or install Opera on your phone.

• Opera Mobile emulator is a desktop application that runs on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It renders pages the same way as Opera Mobile on a real phone. Some tips for getting started can be found in Opera Mobile emulator for desktop.
• Opera Mini Simulator is a Java-based app that runs in your browser and works the same as when installed on a phone.

Like PPK says in the article I linked to earlier there are many more browsers and platforms, but checking your work in these two Opera browsers is a lot better than not checking at all.

Posted on February 1, 2011 in Browsers, Mobile Web

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