Opera remains one of the most popular mobile browsers in the world, and now they’re offering up a fresh experimental build for Android users who want to further personalize their browsing experience. The new release offers support for the many extensions that can be installed from Opera’s gallery.
Developer Andreas Bovens notes that this is an early Opera Labs release they’re making available, and there are still plenty of bugs to work out. More surprisingly, he says that there’s no guarantee as of yet that extension support will be officially added to Opera Mobile.
While that may be the truth, it contradicts something Bovens mentions later in the post: that every aspect of the original extensions API for Opera’s desktop browser was designed with mobile in mind. If that’s the case, it seems highly unlikely that Opera would really leave Mobile users out in the cold.
If you decide to take the Opera Mobile Labs build for a spin, there are a few caveats. Speed Dial extensions aren’t supported and extensions that rely on keyboard or mouse input may not function as expected when hooked into your device’s touchscreen. Extensions that utilize pop-up windows can also behave a bit strangely since they’re forced into tabs at the moment — though Opera will be implementing a different behavior in future iterations of the browser.
Several of Opera’s most popular extensions work just fine, including recognizable names like Ghostery and LastPass. Opera AdBlock works nicely too, and it’s certainly worth installing if you like to be frugal with your mobile bandwidth usage.
Don’t have an Android device to test the new Opera Mobile on? They have also posted emulators for Windows, Mac, and Linux that let you launch it in a window that can simulate the screen sizes and pixel density of several popular phones and tablets.
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