Setting up an Opera Mini testing environment

Opera Mini is Opera’s feature phone browser — our browser for so-called “dumb phones.” It’s lightweight and fast, in part because it is a proxy browser.

Requests for pages go from the user’s handset to Opera’s proxy servers. The proxy servers make the request to the requested web site, parse the HTML and JavaScript — subject to time limits — convert it to Opera Binary Markup Language and deliver it to the client on the handset.

Those time limits are about 5 seconds for Opera Mini 5+ and 2.5 seconds for Opera Mini 4. There are also XMLHttpRequest timeout limits of 15 seconds for Opera Mini 5+ and 8 seconds for Opera Mini. Those limits are in place as a way of managing resources on the proxy servers. Once reached, the scripts are stopped and the page is sent as is to the client.

As a result, things often work differently or less consistently than expected on Opera Mini. Your sites will require a bit more testing to make sure they work reliably. You can, of course, do this by installing Opera Mini on your feature phone or smart phone. Or you can install a Java ME emulator and run Opera Mini on your desktop.

To do that, download MicroEmulator. It is a pure Java implementation of Java ME in Java SE — essentially software that replicates a cell phone environment.

Next, download Opera Mini, taking note of where you’ve saved mini.jad.

When you launch MicroEmulator, you’ll be greeted by the “Launcher” screen. Go to the File menu, and select “Open MIDlet File,” navigating to the location of mini.jad. You’ll see “Opera Mini” in the menu. To open Opera Mini, make sure it is highlighted, then click “Start.”

Click to embiggen.

You can then navigate to the pages you wish to test. Those pages will need to be available to the wider internet, of course. Opera’s proxy servers can’t connect to your local WiFi network or intranet.

Keep in mind that MicroEmulator only has one device configuration by default. You can test whether your site works with Opera Mini out of the box, but questions of usability and navigability will require some skinning on your part, and ideally, some real-world device testing.