Opera Mini gets RSS support and replaces Google with Yahoo! - WTF? :(

Posted on Friday, February 23, 2007 @ 14:31 CET

I've written before about Opera Mini and how great it is for browsing the web on your mobile phone. The recent 3.1 release includes the ability to manage RSS feeds. It comes with a few pre-added and the interface works quite well, though not as nice as the built-in RSS manager I mentioned on my SE Z610 and you can't schedule updates.

Now I'm a huge fan of Opera Mini but version 3 lacks one thing so fundamental that it pisses me off each time I use it. That thing is Google. With the v3 release they replaced Google as the default search engine on the start page with Yahoo!.

I'm sure Yahoo! offered more dollars than Google for this, or they have some deal going or something and who the hell am I to tell you how to run your business but seriously - this is more than a purely financial issue. I don't want to mess with your bottom dollar but you're messing with my user experience. You don't "search for something" on the web anymore, you "google" it. Its a word now even. I mean, who uses Yahoo! to search anyways?

Replacing the default is fine if you give your users the possibility of changing their chosen default search engine back via the settings - but there's no such option. You're locked in to Yahoo!

Other sites are searchable too like Wikipedia, Dictionary.com and IMDb. You can also add to that list from predefined sources such as BBC News, CreativeCommons, eBay, Technorati and Weather Underground. But the option of adding your own custom site like you can on the desktop Opera browser is not there, so you can't even add Google as an option.

So basically, you're locked in to Yahoo! (on the start page) which just plain sucks. To "google" something now I have to bookmark Google, navigate there, click on the search input box and enter my search term. Something I could usually do right when the app starts. This seems like a trivial thing, and sure, it is, but I use this thing every day and it pisses me off every single time.

Fie upon thee Opera Mini!

- paulo

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