It surprises me that Apple approved such a dangerous app.Įverything you type into Opera Mini is sent to Opera’s servers, and everything that the Web sites you visit send back to you is actually sent to Opera’s servers. You have to be really uninformed to use Opera Mini on an iPhone. I think it is faster, and faster than my laptop on some pages. Tapping on the status bar at top of screen does NOT take you to top of page, as it does in other programs. The only things it’s missing: in-site text search and full-screen browsing. It’s the main reason I got into the iphone ‘eco-system’. I will add Opera Mini to my utility belt, but I think I will not be using it very often… ICab also has the full-screen browsing, and some other nifty features, but still has some quirks. There are some “mobile versions” of sites that lack features the whole page has, and that would be useful from Safari… as iCab shows. I actually use iCab for many sites, specially because it can be told to fake a given User-Agent string. That was my experience with iCab: a decent browser, but I uninstalled it because I kept finding myself in Safari anyway. Without any way of changing that default, I simply wouldn’t find myself using Opera Mini very often. I do a lot of my browsing in other apps (RSS, Twitter, Facebook…) and, when I follow a link out of an app or in an email, Mobile Safari opens by default. Don’t think I’ll be needing it ever again. As for Safari, its now on the last page of my Iphone. Opera Mini now sit in where Safari Icon belong. Herewith, a few screen images–if you try the browser out, let us know what you think,īeen waiting for this since I got an Iphone months ago. Isn’t nice that they’ll get to make that decision? In other words, it’s possible that some people will prefer Mini to Safari–or it least find it worth using on a part-time basis. Overall, it feels like a slightly more feature- rich alternative to Safari, not a stripped-down wannabee.
Its approach to juggling multiple pages feels more like tabbed browsing it has a full-screen mode it can save pages for offline reading and it works with Opera Link, which lets you sync bookmarks among multiple copies of Opera. One of them is one I use constantly on desktop browsers: the ability to search for text within a Web page. Certain things about it feel a tad foreign on the iPhone, like its non-standard interface for copying text.īut though Opera Mini isn’t without its downsides, it has a number of attractive features which Safari doesn’t. (Now that Mini is on the App Store, I hope that Opera continues to polish it up,) Like Safari, it doesn’t do Flash unlike Safari, it also can’t play YouTube videos. Its page rendering is much less attractive and desktop-like than Safari’s, and sometimes it’s just plain wrong. I happen to live in an area blessed with very solid AT&T coverage in areas with shakier service, it’s possible that Mini might feel more strikingly fast. I then put my phone into 2G mode, and Mini still did quite well–but it only seemed a bit swifter than Safari. I used it on 3G and Wi-Fi, and it felt reasonably snappy but not outrageously more so than Apple’s Safari. So far, I’ve only tried the browser in the comfort of my own home. Opera Mini’s signature feature is the way it compresses Web pages on the server side, then sends the browser a slimmed-down version to speed things up. And hey, making trouble for browser companies that wish to run on your operating system is demonstrably bad juju. It can be pretty confident that Safari will remain by far the iPhone’s dominant browser even if Opera Mini does quite well. Apple isn’t involved in epic battle with Opera (unlike, say, Google).
I figured the app would make it because…well, I couldn’t think of a reason why it wouldn’t.
I was off by one week: Mini is now available as a free download. Three weeks ago, Opera submitted the iPhone version of its Opera Mini browser to Apple for approval, and I cheerfully predicted it would show up on the App Store within a couple of weeks.