Opera Mobile Browser 9.7- Why is it Worth Waiting for

In this ongoing battle of browsers, the sudden traffic in bringing out a better mobile browser is suddenly worth noticing. After we wrote about Fennec - the Firefox mobile browser, Opera has announced Opera mobile browser 9.7 which is to be released very soon. Now why do I sound excited about it? Because this browser has in it some typical features that you gotta love. Opera brings back Turbo (Once used in Opera Mini, Turbo pre-loaded and compressed pages on servers before it sent out the data to your phone, giving you a much faster load time with only a slight decrease in image quality), includes flash in it, gives Google Gears a chance and many more things.

Top 5 Features

The Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta will include the following great features:

• Improved rendering engine

  Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta uses the Presto 2.2 rendering engine, which will also be used in the Opera 10 desktop browser. Presto 2.2 offers faster page loading and a better support and stability.

• Opera Turbo

  Finally Opera Turbo on mobile. Opera Turbo accelerates the browsing experience by reducing bandwidth consumption up to 80%. Many of you will be familiar with Opera’s compression technology from using Opera Mini, and with Opera Mobile 9.7 you’ll get the best of both worlds - a full-fledged browser with extra Turbo capabilities. It’s not the full version of Opera Turbo yet (yes, that’s a Beta feature in a Beta release) though.

• Improved Widget Manager

  Opera Widgets are small, handy Web applications that run locally on your mobile phone. The new Widget Manager has improved usability and design, and runs independently from the browser.

• Gears

  Gears is a Google open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser. Read more about Gears on Opera Labs.

• OpenGL ES

  Hardware acceleration with OpenGL ES support, ensuring smoother scrolling, panning and a more fluid user interface.

The talk of Flash support, as Opera says,  is still to be considered by Adobe. With that into its kitty, Opera Mobile browser 9.7 can very well beat Firefox in at least one respect.