As announced last night, the Opera Mini web browser is now available as a free download from the iPhone App Store (iTunes). This is one of the first real alternatives to the Safari web browser that ships with the iPhone.
While there are other browsers in the App Store, they all use the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari. Opera Mini takes a different approach by offloading much of the heavy lifting to a remote server — where Opera will compress JavaScript, images, and other data and then send it to your phone. This means your phone will actually have to process fewer bits to accurately show a web page, and the end result is that Opera Mini should render pages more quickly than Safari under some conditions.
I took Opera Mini for a spin on my iPod touch this morning, and I have to say, it doesn’t really feel that much faster than Safari for most tasks. Read the rest of this entry »
when I downloaded it yesterday, I got BLAZING speeds. It was truly fast. But, since this is server side optimization, I think that their SERVERS are getting overloaded since every site in the world has a link up and every FAN BOY has downloaded it and tried it. So, I am going to retest in a day or two.
Yuck. Yesterday I couldn’t even get it working. Retried today and got through. As you say, I assume their servers are overloaded.
The zoom level thing is just unworkable. After the elegance of the Safari double tap zoom and the precision control you have with pinch zoom, the Opera version seems just broken. And the rendering isn’t any faster in my experience, even on a relatively slow AT&T 3G connection, at least rendering Engadget.com anyway.
Try and look at a photo in Facebook. You can’t see it except really tiny. Try to zoom. Nope. View the photo by holding on it, and suddenly you’re in Safari instead. All just totally weird and baffling. I uninstalled it quickly.