(but brace yourself, most sites look terrible in this very limited mobile web browser simulator)
If you want to see how a web page looks on some of the most limited mobile phones on the Internet, you can test any site on the Internet using Opera’s Mini demo site.
The result is not pretty for most web sites today. If you’ve done nothing to optimize your site yet, odds are it won’t look very good in the Opera Mini emulator, but if you can handle the consequences, you’ll have taken the first step toward thinking about how you may need to redesign your site if you want it to look good on most of the cell phones on the planet.
To use Opera’s microbrowser emulator you’ll need to enable Java in your web browser (takes just a minute to add the Java plugin to Firefox).
You can run the emulator in Firefox on most desktop computer. Opera Mini , displays web pages in a tiny window designed to simulate the limited screen size of most of the cell phones in use today.
Anyone with an iPhone has the benefit of a much larger screen and the Safari web browser, which displays most pages remarkably well by comparison (unless the site uses Flash, which is not supported at all).
Opera Mini is capable of reading HTML, but only limited HTML, and Opera makes many ‘adjustments’ to web page designs in an effort to cram them into the limited space of a small cell phone screen.
Opera Mini does a number of things in it’s effort to ‘fix’ web page designs that don’t fit small screens.
Among the many changes Opera Mini makes to web pages:
- Resize all of the images, which can lead to significant changes in how a page looks, especially pages that use large graphics, background images, or multimedia.
- Opera also alters the layout of many pages, stacking images and columns on top of each other in ways that sometimes make pages easier to read on a small screen, and sometimes make them incomprehensible.
Before you subject yourself to the often disturbing effects of the Opera Mini on your carefully crafted web pages, keep in mind that the browsers available for the iPhone, and a growing number of other smartphones and touchphones, do a much better job of displaying web pages than Opera Mini.
The good news (for now), is that the experience of surfing with Opera Mini is so bad most people don’t do it. Owners of smartphones and touchphones are much more likely to visit your web site, unless you’re trying to reach the broader audience that still uses more limited phones.
Until everyone can afford the coolest new phones, it’s not that hard to create a simplified (read stripped down) version of your web site optimized for a small screen.
Here’s a bonus tip: it’s not just about creating a simple design with fewer images, it’s about creating a mobile-optimzied version with the information most relevant to mobile users, such as how to find you when they get lost on the way to your office.
If you want to reach the growing audience of mobile phone users who surf the web with Opera Mini, you’ll need to create a stripped down version of your site and then test, test, test.
You can start testing here (but really, brace yourself):
http://www.opera.com/mini/demo/
