Test Your Website For Mobile Phones Using Opera Mobile Emulator

Webmasters test their websites on different platforms, and browsers to check for compatibility, and rendering errors. This browser testing is very essential for websites, apart from the normal SEO & performance tests. Testing on various desktop browsers is relatively easy, as you can download and install the software on a test PC. However testing on Smart phone mobile browsers such as on an iPhone, or Android is expensive, especially if you don’t own one.

In order to make it easy for web designers to test their websites, Opera has released Opera Mobile Emulator. This emulator is available for Windows, Mac OSX, and also Linux. In case you don’t want to install any software, you can use Opera Mini Simulator, which is an online version of Opera Mini, the speedy mobile browser.

The emulator has all the Opera Mobile features, including Speed Dialing, Tabbed Browsing, etc. There are a few bugs, such as the emulator window overlaying Windows 7 taskbar when not maximized, but the program pretty much does a good job of emulating Opera Mobile.

Your mouse scroll wheel may not work, so use the keyboard Up & Down arrow keys to scroll up/down the web page. You can view the mobile version of your site by going to Settings menu, and turning on the Mobile view option.

You can also turn on Full screen mode, adjust the zoom, and other settings.

Go ahead and test your website for usability, and rendering on a mobile phone using Opera Mobile Emulator. Here are the download links:

Download Opera Mobile Emulator for Windows

Download Opera Mobile Emulator for Mac OSX

Download Opera Mobile Emulator for Linux (gz file)

Download Opera Mobile Emulator for Linux (Deb package)