Opera Mini 5 vs Opera Mini 4.2

Opera recently released Opera Mini 5, which brings many of the benefits of Opera Mini 4.2 to a native program for Windows Mobile.

In the two videos below, Opera Mini 5 is compared to 4.2, and Opera Mobile 10 is compared to 9.7 (in page load times).

What’s interesting is how close the older versions of the browser are to the newer ones. Mini 4.2 is actually faster than Mini 5 at loading WMPowerUser.com, taking 26 seconds, whilst Mini 5 takes 33 seconds. The timings between Mini and Mobile are surprisingly small, with Mobile 9.7 taking 28 seconds, and Mobile 10 taking just 27 seconds (this is with Opera Turbo turned off). Opera Mini 4.2 is (in my opinion) absolutely useless, with continuous “this is unsigned”, “are you sure” type errors, though I guess that stems from it being Java based.

The user interface on Mobile 10 and Mini 5 is pretty much the same, though I personally prefer that of 9.7.

The between Mini and Mobile is as much down to personal preference as anything else. Opera Mini is faster than Mobile at loading and rendering pages (everything is done on a remote server) but the page format isn’t as good, and it feels a little strange. I also received a few connection errors with Opera Mini, when Opera Mobile would very happily load the page.

Which do you prefer, Mobile or Mini?