Symbian Opera Mini

Groups is broken for me too. Last week Google's Blogger Dashboard stopped working in Mini as well. Google seems to have written off Opera Mini as no longer worth the expense of designing for or testing against. It's a discouraging trend, with more and more mainstream sites including Linkedin, Quartz, Google Groups and Blogger are completely broken in Opera Mini now. Others like Forbes, Salon and CNet have severe rendering issues that make them difficult to use.

I think most of blame lies with Web publishers and the Web design community who no longer seem to consider the Opera Mini user base worth reaching, I also sense that Opera is no longer putting as much effort into patching Mini to work with broken sites as they used to.

1823 posts

Originally posted by bogbasic:

I get "Browser not supported" on Google Groups :-s

It looks like basic browser sniffing.
You just need to mask Opera Mobile as another browser inputting the UA-String you want.

Let's make Opera Mobile 12 pretend it's Opera 18 running on Android (I copied the UA-String from my device, you can tweak the Android version and device name, or grab an iPhone Safari UA-String in the web if you want):

1. Type opera:config in the address field to access the advanced config page.
2. User preferences -> Custom user agent -> input:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.0.3; HTC EVO 3D X515m Build/IML74K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/31.0.1650.57 Mobile Safari/537.36 OPR/18.0.1290.67495

Save, exit Opera and open it again. Google Groups should work.

Opera Mini: just forget it.

6 posts

Cheers mate, many thanks indeed. I can get Opera Mobile to install on my symbian phone and the opera:config thing in the address field brings up a 'Preferences editor'. Awesome. I can find 'User Agent' and click on it and it gives a field for Spoof UserAgent ID which is set to "1" by default. I can't actually change the value to anything like the string which you suggested.

*weep* Opera Mini is lovely - my other Android phone is too old to run Opera Mobile, so I'm only able to run Opera Mobile on the symbian one...

I'll keep googling for clues. indeed have done and it looks like a known problem with Symbian versions of Opera - you can't change the user agent in the same way as you can with Android, unless you get some custom-hacked versions. Maybe I'll just live with a daily digest by e-mail!!