Tommy Collison

There was talk of Opera’s (alternative web browser; does basically the same thing as Safari, Firefox, etc.) app for the iPhone/iPod Touch being rejected for having functionally too close to Apple’s original apps (which countless apps have been rejected for in the past). Apple cynics had to eat their hats today though as the red O appeared in App Stores worldwide. I downloaded it to see if it could rival the iPhone’s native web browser, Safari.

Before I go any further, I expected good things from Opera Mini for the simple reason that Safari for the iPhone was nothing spectacular. Sure, it was grand, but when you’re an Apple (hate this word, but it’s true) fanboy, you come to expect more than grand from them.

The very first thing that struck me about the app was the large size of the buttons on the bottom for tabs, settings and the back/forward buttons. Opera have obviously gone and listened to Jason Maria’s “A Plea for the Fat-Fingered” (certainly more than Apple).

A lá Google Chrome, Opera Mini has an opening menu of nine “speed dial” screen-caps of your favourite websites for easy access. Certainly better than Safari’s maze of bookmarks, this method makes for accessing websites much nicer.

It seemed snappier than Safari and I did a bit of research. Turns out…

Opera Mini likely received approval because it’s not an actual web rendering, JavaScript processing engine like Safari (or Firefox, IE, Chrome, etc.) but a proxy-browser. All the rendering and processing is done on Opera’s servers and then compressed and sent to the app for display.

This also means it doesn’t use as much data, and can thus usually display web pages faster and with slower data connections than a full-on browser — especially useful for people on roaming data rates or on EDGE connections.

It breaks SSL encryption by necessity however (https sites), so while you may want to use it to traveling the outskirts, you’ll like want to avoid it when mobile banking downtown.

(You also might want to use it for it’s on-page text search feature — something even iPhone OS 4 still lacks.)

(Via The iPhone Blog)

All in all, I think I prefer it to Safari at this point in time. It’s free, so be sure to check it out. iTunes Store Link