Opera Update Promises Faster Browsing on iOS

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20110524-opera-icon.jpg

Opera has finally released Opera Mini 6 for iOS for iOS, with a bunch of very welcome new features.

My immediate favorite is opening links in a new background tab. Tap and hold on a link, select “Open in New Tab”, and the tabs icon in the toolbar will briefly flash to let you know that stuff is happening behind the scenes.

The tab management is nicely done in Opera, too: tap the tabs icon to see a group of tab previews presented like a stack of cards.

Zooming is much improved in this update, so now you can zoom in and out with standard pinch gestures just as you can everywhere else in iOS.

Opera Mini 6 screenshot

Opera isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, even on the desktop. But this is a nice, speedy, capable browser, with some features that come in particularly useful when you’re on a slow or bandwidth-limited connection. You can switch off image loading with just a couple of taps, for example.

Of course the main reason it’s fast is that everything gets squished through a compression system at Opera HQ. Every page you ask for gets the hell optimized out of it, to keep bandwidth down and speed up. So if privacy matters to you more than speed, you’ll probably want to give it a miss.

Existing users of Opera shouldn’t hesitate, though – this is an update well worth grabbing.

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