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 »