March 25, 2010 by James Oliver
Opera Software, the company behind the lesser known Opera web browser have confirmed that their iPhone browser “Opera mini” is now complete and has been sent to the sceptics at Apple for approval.
Opera, who make an entire range of mobile and computer web browsers, claim that their iPhone incarnation was “the first big step toward giving users a new way to browse on an iPhone.” Until now iPhone users have only ever been given the option to browse using Apple’s own Safari browser, so a fresh injection of software might be a welcome change.
The first glance of the Opera mini iPhone browser came at the mobile world conference in Barcelona where the browser was received really well, being praised for its interface and speed.
Although it does sound like a promising new feature for iPhone users it is still yet to be confirmed by Apple who may decide to completely reject it as they are not often very welcoming to applications that will compete directly with their own Apple default applications, in this case Safari.
It would be nice to give it a try though, especially if Opera’s claim that it loads pages 6 times faster than Safari is true.
The browser uses server-side rendering which compresses the data of a web page by up to 90% before it is transmitted to the phone. This in turn speeds up page load times and therefore places less of a drain on user data allowances.
Opera’s mini 5 browser is currently running on Google’s Android mobile operating system but it is doubtful that this will influence Apple’s decision to approve it or not in anyway, whether they decide to go with it or not we are likely to be waiting a while to find out.
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