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Opera Software said April 22 it is “making mobile Web testing even easier” with the release of a new emulator for testing the Opera browser on Websites from Windows, Linux and Mac desktop computers.
With the Opera Mobile Emulator, “Developers can now install a full version of Opera Mobile, as well as the Opera Widgets Mobile Emulator, and test Websites from the comfort of their desktop computers,” the company said. The emulator can be downloaded here.
In an April 22 blog post, Andreas Bovens, group leader for developer relations at Opera, said, “A bit more than a month after the release of Opera Mobile 10 for Windows Mobile and Symbian smartphones, we are happy to announce a special developer version of Opera Mobile 10 for Windows, Mac and Linux.”
“With Opera Mobile running on the desktop, developers are relieved of [the burden of] investing time and money in multiple phones for testing. Opera Mobile allows developers to resize the application easily to emulate the wide variety of mobile screen sizes. The Opera Widgets Mobile Emulator similarly helps developers test their mobile widgets directly from their computers. Both these applications can be used in tandem with Opera Dragonfly [a JavaScript debugger], significantly lowering the barrier to mobile debugging,” Opera said.
“With more people accessing the Web from their phones, optimizing and tweaking Web content for display on phones is increasingly important,” Bovens said in a statement. “By making a version of Opera Mobile available for normal desktop computers, [Opera Software has made it so that] developers are now able to create mobile optimized Websites and widgets quickly and efficiently, without investing in multiple testing devices.”
In his blog post, Bovens said, “Testing mobile browsers usually requires Web developers to buy one or more devices on which they then can investigate how their Websites perform. The Opera Mobile Emulator is designed to make the whole testing effort a bit easier: You install a small, native application on the platform of your choice, and load Web pages from the comfort of your desktop.”
A developer introduction can be found here.