Opera Mini 4.2 hits beta

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 11 Nov 2008 at 10:43

Opera Mini 4.2 has arrived in beta, bringing a host of incremental upgrades and the promise of a speed boost.

The browser aims to replicate the desktop surfing experience on any phone it's installed on by providing a small image of the full web page and allowing the user to scroll around and zoom in on the parts they wish to read.

Among its new features, Opera Mini offers improved video support for YouTube and other mobile video services by providing a bridge to the phone's native browser, or media player.

There's also a host of new skins, as well as Opera Link, its desktop synchronisation feature which has been bolstered to allow users to synch notes to Mini. The synch already allowed users to share history, bookmarks and speed dial between Mini and the desktop-based browser.

The company is also touting a general performance boost thanks to a new data centre built in the US.

"Opera Mini 4.2 can use our newly established server park in the US," Opera says in a statement. "This means significantly faster page downloads for our users in the Americas and Asia-Pacific region. Users in the rest of the world will also experience faster page downloads since we've reduced the load on our other servers."

Opera says there are 20 million Mini users kicking around, leading the company to claim it is the biggest mobile web browser in the world. Try it yourself here.

The release of Mini follows weeks after Mozilla released the first alpha of its much-anticipated mobile browser, dubbed Fennec.