Opera Mobile 9.5 proven as the better browser

When reading blogs, I often come across statements saying Opera Mobile, as on the HTC Touch Diamond for example, is good, but will never be as good as Safari Mobile on the iPhone. Of course some brave commentators have come out and have said, frankly, Opera Mobile 9.5 is much better than Safari Mobile. Unfortunately this is often taken as a matter of opinion, rather than the fact it is. Despite sporting obvious advantages such as being able to set a home page, open a link in a new tab, cut and paste and download files to local storage, many still maintain objectively the iPhone browser is better, with a better renderer and better ease of use.

Fortunately there are a few objective tests on the net for browser performance, and the Acid suite of tests is one of them. What happens when we run these two Web 2.0 browsers through this test suite?

From the above video it should be clear that Opera Mobile 9.5 is both easier to use (better zooming with less effort) and objectively is more standards compliant that the iPhone browser.

While Opera Mobile 9.5 is only currently available on a few devices, such as the HTC Touch Diamond, HTC Advantage II and Samsung Omnia, many versions are available freely on the internet, and we can only hope Opera will soon make this available as a stand alone purchase.

In the mean time, when an iPhone user say they have the best mobile browser, you can confidently tell them they are very very wrong.