Opera Mini For iPhone Submitted To App Store Today 314
An anonymous reader writes "Opera Mini for iPhone was officially submitted to the Apple iPhone App store today. A select few first saw it at Mobile World Congress 2010 in February. Now, the 'fast like a rocket' browser is taking its first big step towards giving users a new way to browse on the iPhone."
Re:Meh (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know if it will ever match the speed of Safari considering they don't have access to the private API's that Apple does
Actually, there's a video [youtube.com] showing it to be quite a bit faster than Safari in a side-by-side comparison.
Re:Force Their Hand (Score:4, Informative)
Dare Apple look any more evil than their dictatorship at the app store has made them out to be?
Oh, they dare. They dare.
They already have their core addicts ^w market, fashionistas and fanbois. The point of their iron control is not to enhance market share; the point of their market share is to enhance their iron control.
To paraphrase Ernestine as an Appstore administrator: "We don't care. We're Apple. We don't have to."
Re:DOA (Score:2, Informative)
Apple will say that it duplicates existing iPhone functions and will refuse to accept it.
yepyep. that's their favorite rejection reason. "it competes with us". Most businesses can't just tell someone else entering their market "nope, that would compete with us, you can't do that."
Re:Meh (Score:3, Informative)
Opera Mini is not a browser; it serves images rendered by Opera's servers.
It is significantly faster on mobile platforms than proper browsers, not to mention bandwidth savings.
Re:Meh (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know if it will ever match the speed of Safari
Apparently you didn't RTFA or watch the included youtube video. Opera Mini loaded 5 pages in the same time as it took Safari to load 1. Of course it does that using compression.
You can read more about the compression technology here. It's somewhat similar to Opera Turbo for dialup users, but much more efficient:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_mini#Functionality [wikipedia.org]
Re:Meh (Score:5, Informative)
It more than matches the speed of Safari, it destroys it. Safari is a traditional browser; establish a connection to the web server (some round trips right there), request and download the requested HTML page (another round trip), download any first-tier needed assets (JS, CSS, images, etc) (likely not all done in parallel, more round trips), download any second-tier assets (example, images from CSS, anything dynamically written by the JS, etc), and so on. All in all, you're probably adding in dozens of round trips at the least. The latency on the 3G link alone (ignoring internet latency) is probably 100+ms for a round trip, so you're adding multiple seconds worth of latency just by being on 3G.
Opera, on the other hand, does absolutely everything server-side. Any requests are being made from a connection that isn't sitting on the other side of a 100+ms wireless link, and they probably do a lot of caching on top of that. The actual data is sent to the client browser in the minimum number of round trips; enough to establish the connection and make the request. All content comes back in one single compressed glob. A page that might have taken 10 seconds to load before can suddenly load in half a second.
There are downsides, of course, to having no client-side javascript. Most web apps require connections to the server to do what was before a local operation. You're effectively streaming any changes to the page from the server to the client (presumably keeping the connection open while looking at the page in case any changes need to be sent), and this is not ideal.
Unfortunately, it's mandatory; Apple won't allow javascript execution locally.
Re:Meh (Score:2, Informative)
Re:DOA (Score:3, Informative)
Well then you've justified why Microsoft wouldn't be evil.
Re:Aside from Flash.... (Score:1, Informative)
Considering that Safari the only app that has ever caused my phone to hard lock to the point of needing a hard reset, and as far as I understand all non-Apple apps aren't allowed to dive deep enough into the OS to even hope to cause anything other than the app itself to crash, a browser that doesn't kill my phone constantly is good enough reason for me.
Not to mention that while roaming in the US I get billed at the wonderful rate of 3 cents per 1KB (Yes you read that right, $30.72 per 1MB) Opera stands to save me a LOT of money if I have to use my data in a pinch.
Re:Opera Marketing Win (Score:3, Informative)
wow... there goes my bankaccount...
It's encrypted between Opera's proxy server and the target website, but not between your phone and Opera's server.
From their Opera Mini FAQ [opera.com]:
If you do not trust Opera Software, make sure you do not use our application to enter any kind of sensitive information.
Re:Meh (Score:4, Informative)
This is patently false. Opera pre-processes the web pages via their proxy farm to optimize the images and web pages for the various form factor devices that it runs on. It is a browser, and it contains a very fast rendering engine.
Re:Meh (Score:4, Informative)
The video is misleading. The Opera side begins browsing and clicking on links before the page is done loading, thus the entire page is not loaded, but they count the page twoards the total.
1:17 - page stops loading when screen is pressed.
1:26 - browsing begins before page is finished loading, appears to end when pressed.
1:33 - page stops loading when screen is pressed. (full page does appear to load however)
1:44 - page stops loading when screen is pressed.
1:53 - page loads completely
It looks fast, but still misleading.
Re:Meh (Score:5, Informative)
Safari is a traditional browser; establish a connection to the web server (some round trips right there), request and download the requested HTML page (another round trip), download any first-tier needed assets (JS, CSS, images, etc) (likely not all done in parallel, more round trips), download any second-tier assets (example, images from CSS, anything dynamically written by the JS, etc), and so on. All in all, you're probably adding in dozens of round trips at the least.
Hasn't worked that way since HTTP v1.0, when each thing you wanted had to be requested individually, which sucked which is why they changed it. Now browsers can request many elements at once, and the server can send them all back in the same stream. There are multiple round trips needed for establishing the connection and making the initial http request, and any elements that the browser only knows it needs until after processing a script of course have to wait for the script to be received and processed. But there should not be seconds of latency merely due to mandatory round-trip times because there aren't that many.
Obviously the way Opera does it is still going to be way faster.
Re:Meh (Score:5, Informative)
Instead of entering the discussion on what the meaning of "render" is I will just point out that Opera Mini is useless without access to "proxy farm".
Try to access a web site not available from outside you network (e.g. wifi router cfg page) - not possible.
Try to open saved html page - ditto.
Can't render shit on its own? Yup, that's your 'very fast rendering engine'.
Re:DOA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:DOA (Score:4, Informative)
Your analogy is dumb. The app store is the only store that exists in this case. Nobody cares all that much if Starbucks carries the NYT as its only newspaper, because you can go just about anywhere else you want to buy any other kind of newspaper. If Starbucks were the only place in the world you could buy newspapers, and they refused to carry certain ones -- especially with spurious reasoning as to why some are rejected and others are not -- it would be evil.
Apple is leveraging its position to extort money and control from users and developers at the expense of the best interests of people who have bought iphones and itouches. It's not very much different from Microsoft's IE maneuvers in the late 90s and early 2000s.
It's not genocide evil, but if you're going to judge evil in a boolean manner, it's totally, utterly, completely evil. The only way it is by being pedantic about what is or is not evil and defining it so as to only includes things you decide, which is pretty ironic, given the content of your post.
Re:Meh (Score:3, Informative)
Looks faster (Score:1, Informative)
The video is misleading. The Opera side begins browsing and clicking on links before the page is done loading, thus the entire page is not loaded, but they count the page twoards the total.
You sure?
It looks to me like while they start moving around the page before it finishes loading, in each case there is a perceptible time between when the "progress spinner" stops before they click to the next page. The user on the opera side isn't actually leaving the current page before it says it's loaded.
Re:Droid does... (Score:3, Informative)
Care to elaborate where Google failed, shipping 60,000 Android units a day [mobilecrunch.com] is hardly what I'd call an unmitigated disaster.
Re:Meh (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong, actually. The pages are sent to the device from the proxy server in the compressed OBML format. They must be rendered in order to be viewed. Rendering MUST TAKE PLACE if you want to see a web page in a format in anything other raw page markup, in this case, a binary format. The format that the information is sent to the device is irrelevant. What is sent from the proxy server is most definitely NOT 'images rendered by Opera's servers' as you stated previously.
Yup, that's the 'very fast rendering engine' all right.
Re:Meh (Score:3, Informative)
I'm also curious how this runs at all - did Apple finally catch up with the 1990s by adding Java support? Or did Opera waste the time writing a custom version for the minority of Iphone users, because it can't support that basic standard?