Opera tests latest mobile browser
Web browser company Opera has released another beta version of its popular mobile browser, Opera Mini.
Opera Mini 3 beta 2 has added secure browsing — passwords can be transmitted via a secure connection — and RSS feed preview and aggregation, which allows the user to gather and display web content from sites of their choice.
However, the company has warned that the beta currently contains "known security issues", so should not be used for transmitting sensitive data in its beta form. It's not known when the final version will be released.
The mobile browser has also added a facility to enable the user to upload photos taken with a phone to social networking sites, and collapsible menu lists.
In other Opera news, the company has announced Release Candidate 1 (RC1) for Opera 9.1, the upcoming version of its desktop web browser. Opera 9.1 will have more anti-fraud measures than its predecessor, including a trusted site index. The browser will check against the Opera database to check whether the site is trusted, unknown or fraudulent. If a user tries to visit a fraudulent site Opera will display a warning and will block access.
Both Mozilla Foundation's Firefox 2 and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 also contain anti-fraud features. Firefox blocks sites through a blacklist, and IE 7 through a whitelist. Opera 9.1 attempts to verify the trustworthiness of a site through certification.
When a user browses to a site they have not visited before, Opera 9.1 sends a request for site information to the Opera server. The reply from the server is an XML document containing the trust level of the domain. This reply will be cached by Opera for a time indicated by its server. Information about well-trusted sites can be cached for a longer period than for unknown sites, according to Opera.