Mobile browsers: Opera Mobile 12 shines in html5test

Look at Opera Mobile 12 stealing Chrome Mobile’s & Firefox Mobile’s thunder:

And while there’s more to browsers then just HTML5-support, Opera Mobile 12 also seems to offer greater support for modern web technology features than IE9.

To be honest, Opera Mobile 12 doesn’t shine in the JavaScript performance benchmarks (2843,6ms for Sunspider, 463 on the Google V8 test, both of  which at least Firefox Mobile does a better job at), but with the upcoming Firefox Mobile 12 and the (Android 4-only) Chrome Mobile beta the mobile browser “wars” have certainly shifted into a -much- higher gear. Let’s hope Microsoft (and Apple, but Safari Mobile isn’t too far behind yet) follows suit.

While waiting for Firefox Mobile 11

I’m on the beta-release channel for both my desktop and mobile Firefox and my desktop has been running version 11 (with SPDY) for over a week now, but there hasn’t been an update for Firefox Mobile Beta in the Android Market yet. Apparently the Mozillians are working hard to finish the complete overhaul of the front-end, which integrates with Android UI (instead of using Mozilla’s own XUL) and services (synchronization in particular).
As I’m an impatient guy, I installed the Aurora version of Firefox Mobile, which is already at version 12 and that runs surprisingly well. Firefox Mobile already had the best HTML5-support and superior JavaScript-performance, but the new version (be it 11 or 12) adds a lower memory footprint and (much) faster start-up-time to that (and it has Flash, which I don’t care for really).
Mozilla is doing a great job in the mobile space, with the browser, but also with WebAPI and B2G. No, I don’t think I’ll switch to Chrome Mobile any time soon.