Opera Mobile Emulator 12 Update

Opera Mobile Emulator screenshot

A few weeks after our Opera Mobile 12 release for Android and Symbian, we're happy to announce that there now also is a corresponding update of the Opera Mobile Emulator!

If you haven't used it yet, the Opera Mobile Emulator is a version of Opera Mobile that runs on your Windows, Mac or Linux machine, and this without having to install any complex SDKs or the like. Upon launch, you'll get a handy Profile panel with various size, pixel density, orientation and UI options, from which you can spawn different Opera Mobile instances for developing or testing your site — or for simply browsing the web! Using Opera Dragonfly's remote debugging capabilities, you can also inspect the inner workings of your site on mobile, and finetune your CSS and JavaScript.

So, what's new?

  1. As this release goes hand in hand with Opera Mobile 12, we have upgraded the Presto rendering engine to Presto/2.10.254.
  2. We've added a -displayzoom argument, which you can use to display the full browser window at a percentage of its original size. This is useful when the Opera Mobile instance you spawn has a larger height than the height of your computer and you want to make it fit: e.g. the HTC Desire profile triggers Opera Mobile to have a size of 480×800px, but my MacBook Pro's dock and menu bar reduces this to be 480×702px, distorting the profile's proportions. By using -displayzoom 80, the browser is rendered at 384×640px (preserving the aspect ratio), but the browser still behaves as if it was 480×800px.
  3. You can now use again pinch gestures on your Mac trackpad to zoom in and out.
  4. Support for a number of common desktop shortcuts: tab and shift+tab to navigate between form elements, backspace to go to the previous page, ctrl/cmd+a to select all text in an input field, etc.
  5. Updated profiles in the launcher.
  6. Various bug fixes.

Note: <video>, <audio> and getUserMedia are currently not supported in the emulator. We're still looking into how to improve this, but keep these limitations in mind.

So, that's it! Try out the latest Opera Mobile Emulator build, integrate it in your mobile first workflow, and be sure to tell your web developer colleagues about it as well!

As always, we welcome all feedback. Leave a comment on this post, or reach out to us on Twitter.