Opera Mini Browser Submitted to the App Store

John Brownlee ()

According to a long and enthusiastic press release (doubtlessly designed to bring as much attention to the approval process as possible), Opera has announced that they have submitted their Opera Mini browser to the App Store.

Although Apple often takes an unfavorable view upon applications which duplicate functionality of built-in iPhone apps, Opera thinks their Mini browser gets around the issue by refusing to execute code natively on the handset. Instead, it asks Opera’s servers to translate, optimize and render the data into a format that only the Opera Mini browser can understand.

The result? A browser that is supposedly up to five times faster than Mobile Safari, especially on EDGE.

It certainly seems like it’s fast… but that’s not to say that Opera Mini doesn’t have its share of problems. Here’s what Gizmodo had to say:

Overall, it’s the fastest I’ve ever felt Opera Mini perform across any platform. Everything happens instantly, and it feels really smooth, and polished. As with other versions of Opera Mini, there’s no pinch-to-zoom, simply one-touch, fit to column, but the super speed makes that just fine, at least when it properly displays columns—it had a problem rendering Giz, for instance, but that was the only page where I had an “AHA it’s broke” moment. (Expect other pages that give Opera Mini problems to still have issues here, since it’s the same engine, after all.) It caches back pages, moving between them quickly, because Opera Mini is used to working with “tens of megabytes, and here we lots of megabytes of RAM to play with,” says Opera founder and former CEO Jon von Tetzchner. What’s really nice? Finding text in page, which Safari doesn’t have.

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Review: Opera Mini For iPhone

No pinch-to-zoom is a huge gap in functionality, so I doubt this will be the go-to browser for most iPhone users, even if Apple accepts it. But if you need a speedy browser in areas with shoddy 3G coverage, this could be an excellent back-up to have in your app arsenal.

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About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in iPhone Apps, News |

  • http://ihbs.co.uk Ben

    i hope it doesnt have to re-render each web page when you look at other pages in safari. If i open a new tab, open a page, close it, and go back to the first, it has to re load it, which i hate. It already did that, theres no need for it to do it again!

  • Gazoobee

    @ Ben: This is exactly what Opera mini does. On any page with dynamic content it has to request the entire page every time the dynamic content changes.

    I’m also surprised greatly that this article doesn’t mention the huge downside to Opera mini in terms of the fact that it doesn’t render dynamic content at all and uses insecure proxies between you and the “real” internet.

    If Apple or Microsoft became the corporate gatekeeper to everyone’s internet, there would be huge outrage from the tech community. When Opera does it they “root for the little guy?” Don’t get.