I think MicroB on OS2008 has been a big step up from the OS2007beta. Much faster initial load, faster rendering, lots of CSS fixes. While Opera was a nice option for lightweight sites I was pretty much saved by MicroB as Opera couldn't handle the backend of our online store. I'd love to have both still, but if I had to pick one...

I think we've got a winner.

Opera is very good at working on devices with small memory footprints. They've spent years developing Opera to run on smartphones, embedded devices, and so on. They've obviously got some clue at how to handle pages when you're dealing with resource limits. More importantly, they seem to know how to render pages to fit on small displays.

MicroB, on the other hand, is a slimmed down Mozilla. To my knowledge, nobody has *ever* called Mozilla slim, svelte. I'm actually quite sure that the terms thrown around were 'resource hog' and 'memory hungry'. Which is fine if you're on a desktop with a fast processor and adequate memory.

Here's where Nokia needs to snap to attention. The tablets are resource constrained. 128MB of RAM (and 128MB of semi-slow swap) is not a lot of memory. I don't have Opera installed anymore, so I can't do comparisons, I'd wager if you have both Opera and MicroB installed on an OS2007 device, and compare memory usage when rendering the same page, Opera would come out ahead.

I'm not saying MicroB doesn't have potential, and I'm not saying that one day it won't be great. It clearly has potential. It's just not great now. It's barely adequate now. And Nokia shouldn't be passing barely adequate off on it's loyal users. Keep the barely adequate products in beta and development until they're fully adequate.

Now that's just hyperbole, and you know it. I've been using MicroB exclusively since the beta was first released, and it's certainly far from "barely adequate".

Is it? If I'm losing some capability, and I certainly am, it's not adequate compared to what I had before. It's buggy, it's slower, and it crashes. Compared to the old opera, it's a step backwards.

For example, explain to me why I see horizontal scrollbars on http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl. Why bother with the zoom buttons if I'm going to have to scroll horizontally. Opera never had such issues.

Now, I love the fact that you selectively quoted me, kudos. But I didn't say it won't improve... I certainly think it will. I just don't think it's done yet, and I don't think it's going to be done for a number of months, and I think throwing it out too early is going to turn people off.

I have done this exact test, and yes, Opera comes out ahead. Particularly when there are any images on the page. For some reason this seems to take much more memory in MicroB.

My personal experience/feeling is that MicroB on OS2008 is better overall than Opera was on OS2007. I rarely see MicroB crashing on OS2008 (certainly less than Opera did for me on OS2007). Also, during OS2007 days there was too much times that I had to use MicroB beta since Opera just didn't work at all (Like CVS web site you can't browse at all. Once I was browsing newegg's web site and Opera always crashed... while MicroB just handled it fine.) While MicroB still has many bugs, I haven't found those too serious to ruin my web experience...

I agree that Opera is certainly better optimized for portable devices than Microb, at least for now. But since MicroB does support more websites and features, and does work reasonably well on OS2008, I do see a point on developing it further and dropping Opera. (We do not want developers limited resources to work on TWO projects... what would cause both projects become crap...)

Again, just my 2 cents... YMMV.

Umm, because the page demands more then 800px Looks like it expects 1024px width. So even if you do 80% zoom (which is a dumb option, should be 75%) then you would only get a virtual 1000px. Maybe you had the "Fit width to view" option enabled ? Or Opera was just willing to toss some layout pixels to make it fit... not sure.

I really haven't seen it "crash" yet with the sites I frequent. Of course YMMV, but if you have sites that do it all the time I'm sure they would love to know about it so can be fixed.

Just wait for OS2008.

Heh, if you wanted a browser that worked 100% of the time you should have bought a pocket pc. Oh, wait......

Well, everything I've read about the N810 has convinced me to stick with my N800. Give it time? What right do I have to expect a "mature" software app? I guess I can expert the next vehicle I buy to have only forward gears working, no reverse.