Opera Mini releases with new design and improved features

Opera.com

To celebrate the 10th year of the Opera Mini, the little brother to the regular Opera mobile browser for Android gets an upgrade. 

The new Opera Mini is now revamped and made more native to Android. Opera says that with the new look and new interface for the Mini browser, the app will now function unobtrusively in the Android background. 

For those not familiar with Opera, the browser comes in two versions: the regular mobile web browser and Opera Mini. The latter is the much preferred browser by those who wish to save data charges, since it incorporates an always-on data saving feature that compresses data more than most mobile browsers without breaking the site's layout. In the new version, Opera Mini can compress sites up to a tenth of their original size, saving users as much as 88 percent on their data usage.

Also, the new Mini browser now has a much more simplified home menu, and private browsing has also been introduced. In this mode, users can surf and browse without leaving a browsing history or website cookies. There is also an added Discover feed that features the most recent and most popular posts currently on the Internet. 

The Speed Dial mode for the Opera Mini has also been improved on the Android version. In addition, there is an added custom option for the browser's layout, so that users can change their own version to suit their preference. 

Opera hopes that with the unveiling of the new and improved version of the Opera Mini mobile browser, it will bring more users into the fold. The company figures that Opera may reach 275 million users by 2017, more than double the figure for current Opera users, pegged at 130 million.