Opera Mini lands at MWC. Lives up to speed promise.
By Alexis • Feb 18th, 2010 • Category: Industry News- Photo: Opera
Opera, long considered the best mobile web browser, revealed its iPhone app at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona. Leading up to the reveal, the company promised that, above all else, the mobile browser would be faster than the iPhone’s native browser. This proved true. Convincingly so.
Demonstration
- Photo: Apple
Opera demonstrated this technology by loading up the New York Times using both Opera iPhone and Safari. It loaded, on most accounts, five times faster than Safari could load the exact same site. How does Opera do this? With some nifty engineering that means their servers pull the web page you want before sending it through to your phone, and then greatly minimise and streamline the content. This method is how the mobile browser is able to provide web pages at very small data sizes.
The App Store approval hiccup
- Photo: Apple
The browser on display was running on the iPhone SDK (Standard Development Kit), which meant it had not received Apple’s approval yet. Opera, however, are confident that Apple will not reject their application. This is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, Apple has never had an issue rejecting applications for its own (often dubious) reasons. Secondly, Apple has previously indicated applications that ‘duplicate’ the device’s core function – a category web browsing falls into – are strictly prohibited and will not be approved. Finally, one can only conclude Opera has some sort of leverage on Apple and its iPhone platform, and can only speculate the FCC investigation into the App Store has something to do with this.
Regardless, a faster and less data-intensive browsing experience only yields positives. The hope is Opera’s gamble pays off and the iPhone finally gets a mobile browser that is not Safari.
Tags for this article: iPhone
