MacFlaunt

Apple on Monday approved the Opera Mini browser for the iPhone, and the software is now available to download for free from the App Store. Speculation was rife that Apple wouldn’t approve the app because it duplicates functionality of the Safari browser, but Opera Mini made it to the App Store against all odds.

Opera Mini is the first third party Web browser to make it on the iPhone. By now, Apple’s phone had alternative browsers, which were merely rehashes of the Safari mobile browser. Opera Mini for iPhone is different: when you type an URL in the address bar, the page is compressed up to 90 percent on Opera’s servers and then loaded onto your phone.

This loading/rendering mechanism that Opera Mini uses leads to a much faster Web browsing experience on your mobile to Apple’s own Safari, especially when using GSM connections. Opera’s browser is also expected to reduce the traffic burden on wireless carriers.

Opera Mini for iPhone is as full-featured as Apple’s Safari browser. When you open the app, you are shown a screen with nine thumbnails for various sites. Six of them are pre-set by Opera and three of them are ready for customisation. You can also edit later the first six thumbnails with your preferred sites.

Pages load very quickly, a good few seconds faster than Safari in most cases. I tested the loading times for both Opera and Safari on WiFi and GSM connections, and except the cases when pages were already cached in Safari, Opera Mini was always the speediest.

Opera Mini for the iPhone also does tabs, displayed as a deck of cards at the bottom of the screen. You can flip and shuffle through the open tabs, though there is no full-screen tab switcher. Opera Mini for iPhone can also open more tabs than Safari’s magic number 8 (I went up to 13). As a bonus, Opera Mini also lets your search through Amazon, eBay or Wikipedia from its search bar (Google search is default).

Some other nice features included in Opera Mini for iPhone are in-page search, full-screen browsing, and saved pages, which allow you to save a certain Webpage locally on your iPhone for offline reading. For those used to Safari’s double-tap to zoom in to a certain area of a page, this action is achieved with a single tap in Opera Mini for iPhone, which can be quite confusing initially.

As for page-rendering, Opera Mini for iPhone displays all pages with the same font, so for example The New York Times’ home page won’t look the same in Safari and Opera Mini, despite most of the page formatting kept intact. This is probably the cost you have to pay for speed achieved through rendering sites on Opera’s servers. Nevertheless, most pages that I tried Opera Mini for iPhone with looked fine.

So if you are usually in areas with poor 3G reception, Opera Mini is definitely worth a try for its speediness, especially as it is a free download.