

You tell us.īolt browser 1.5 is free to download. Maybe speed is all that matters and you'll stick with Opera Mini for now. You may find that a few seconds are worth it to you to use Bolt's interface. In the meantime, try them both out and chime in with your own views. We'll see if these numbers continue to stand up when Opera Mini 5 comes out of beta. So which Java browser prevails overall? It's a tough call: Bolt renders graphics more clearly, but Opera was speedier. The 5 key toggles split-screen view on and off. As you pass the cursor over the zoomed-out section up top, the same area is zoomed in below. Bolt also has an interesting feature that Opera doesn't-the capability to split the screen. On some sites, Opera Mini stripped an image or two out, or the photo footprints drastically condensed. Opera Mini 4.2 tended to overly compress some, but it bought it speed. Our tests clearly favor Opera Mini for speed, but there are one or two other caveats and clarifications to consider before declaring an all-around winner.įirst, Bolt renders pages more faithfully than Opera Mini, with sharper text and photos, and with all the photos intact. Yelp was about the same for Bolt 1.5 and Opera Mini 4.2, about 14 seconds, but one Bolt page ran 2 seconds slower. On Opera, the same stories loaded in 19, 11, and 10 seconds. It took 26 seconds to load The New York Times site and two other stories on Bolt. Were you to run the same test, you might get slightly different numbers.īolt took 12-14 seconds to load and navigate on versus Opera Mini's 9-13 seconds. We're telling you this because we know what a difference carrier, data strength, and handset type makes in each user's result.

We would have thrown Opera Mini 5 beta into the mix, but it didn't seem compatible yet with our testing phone, a Samsung Propel on AT&T's 3G network. Without ever budging from our roost, we tested navigation three times on each of three sites, keeping the routine the same for Bolt 1.5 and Opera Mini 4.2. That may be, but we pulled up our online stopwatch to run our own surf tests. In other words, 2.3MB from the Web shrinks down to 100KB. Bolt 1.5's new video manager selects the best of three delivery mechanisms for streaming video on your device, including triggering your media player if the phone isn't well equipped for playback.īut what of those speed claims? Bolt, a proxy browser built on Webkit, now claims that it's about 15 percent faster than before and compresses data at a 23:1 ratio. It also caches pages now, so you can jump back to the previous page without reloading it.
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True, Bolt has undergone some cosmetic alterations, such as a Google search box that's separate from the URL bar, and a welcome download manager that lets you download files as well as upload.
