Opera Mini for the iPhone gets tested
By
Kshitij Sobti |
Updated on 16-Feb-2010
Opera Software recently made the exciting announcement that they would be releasing their Opera Mini browser for the iPhone. Now the browser has undergone testing in the hands of Michael Conroy of wired.co.uk and he seems to be quite pleased with it.
He praises the speed of both the interface and the browsing itself, which improves significantly while running on such a powerful device. Scrolling and zooming are smooth however the browser doesn’t support the miulti-touch gestures that iPhone users are so fond of. However he claims that it is easy to get by without them as the browser is smart enough to work without the need for manual zooming.
The user interface of the browser too maintains the Opera look instead of adopting to Apple’s standards. A feature specific to the iPhone though seems to be a session manager which loads the tabs opened during your previous session. Quite useful considering the iPhone’s lack of proper multitasking.
As expected the browser does not have the full fledged Presto rendering engine found in their Opera Mobile and desktop browsers, but instead relies on the rendering done by Opera Turbo servers. The page is sent to the device in a compressed binary format which is smaller and requires less processing.
While the iPhone is powerful enough to handle the full browser, the shackles placed by Apple around every developer come in the way, as custom browsers not based on WebKit are not allowed. Applications are not allowed to execute any interpreted code which is a requirement for a browser with JavaScript.
It is still not certain whether the application will even make it to the AppStore, however Opera representatives seem confident that it will make it through. They claim it brings enough new to the table with its compression technology to not be considered a duplication of functionality.
If it doesn’t make it to the AppStore though, we are sure to have a huge number of disappointed Opera fans, and it could potentially be repeat of what happened with Google Voice.