Gadgetory

this is Dan Seaver with the verge and we're here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona checking out the new opera browser for Android smartphones what we're checking out here is a very early build of the browser that uses the new WebKit rendering engine which is a marked change from opera which used to rely on its own presto engine WebKit is a much more popular engine same processing engine that the Android stock Android browser uses as well as iOS a couple of different changes here they've cleaned up the speed dial here so they made a little cleaner you can create folders from your bookmarks very similar to icons in your homescreen they've also added this discover tab here which is designed to provide you content for a variety of categories and then you can swipe over and see more of your history there the whole design of this app itself has been freshened up to better fit in with Android style guidelines it looks and feels very similar to Chrome for for Android you've got an omni box here for searching and looking up your various web pages they've got a new tab interface here that you can browse through your open tabs and then you have a drop down menu to access various settings one of the things that they've added to the new version of opera is this off-road mode which uses the data compression technology that the they pioneered on the Opera Mini browser which allows you to save data when you're on the go and it doesn't use as much data plan opera claims that you can save about 90 percent of your data usage by using its off-road compression browsing within the Opera browser is pretty good webpages scroll pretty quickly the WebKit rendering engine seems to be a lot better than the older presto engine as far as rendering negating scrolling is fairly smooth once a site has actually loaded and it features things like double tap to zoom and standard pinch to zoom and all those work pretty well this is a very early version of the Opera browser that we're looking at here but the company says it'll be available in the Google Play Store later this year