Submitted by Since the announcement from Opera about submitting Opera Mini to the App Store made it to the front page, I can’t really relegate the application’s admittance into the App Store to the side column – I’m not particularly liked by the Apple fans as it is. So, here it goes, full frontal: Apple has accepted Opera Mini into the App Store.
Yeah, and that leaves me with this space to fill with some stuff about how good or bad the application is, but heck, I haven’t a single idea. I tried it out quickly, but since I don’t like the idea of my browsing bits going through Opera’s servers, I’m not keen on trying it out too much. I did notice that the OSAlert’ mobile browser detection thingamabob redirects Opera Mini on the iPhone to our mobile site, which I think classifies as a bug. I’ll talk with Adam and Eugenia to see if there’s a way to fix that.
What else can I say? Ah, there we go, a quote from Opera’s CEO. “We are delighted to offer iPhone and iPod touch users a great browsing experience with the Opera Mini App,” said Lars Boilesen, CEO of Opera Software, “This app is another step toward Opera’s goal of bringing the Web to more people in more places.”
Ah, I’ve got something else to talk about. At the end of the OSAlert article about the announcement I said that “if Apple wants to score some major points, it should approve Opera Mini by the end of the day (or at least really soon), but my guess is that won’t happen. I’m not sure whether Apple will approve the browser or not, but if it does, it’s going to take a while”.
It’s taken 20 days, but I’m not sure if that qualifies as “a while” since I’m not familiar with how long it usually takes. Heck, who cares – download the thing and see if it’s your cup of unicorn. I’m sticking to Mobile Safari, in any case.
That unicorn cup is *awesome*. We should have those in an OSAlert shop.
Yeah that thing is made of pure ace. Want.
Sorry, it’s completely off topic but since both of you are here, I’ve a website suggestion; allow registered users to change there alias. I signed up after a few other sites which all separated the login name and displayed alias along with allowing alias to be changed after the fact. It was somewhat of an unpleasant surprise to find out that I couldn’t change my displayed alias. My only option now, having learned the registration bugs, is to delete my account and open an entirely new one assuming it’s not going to trip over the same email address being used.
If either of you are the webdeveloper or can contact them directly; fixing the alias bug would be a great benefit to the registered visitors.
Thats not a bug, it’s a feature.
If people were able to change their alias’ it would be hard to keep track of the community.
I say, allow a user to change their alias once a year.
You could still track the ID number or user account behind the scenes. From the visitor view, some user changing there displayed alias should be pretty obvious. On other sites, it will actually change your alias on past (within recent history?) comments so changing an alias is not going to allow someone to escape from stupid opinions.
If the display alias is the only way to track the community, that would be a second bug to report.
If download speed was all that was required to qualify as a “great browsing experience,” then maybe. The rendering sucks, zooming is bad (only two modes, and one is unreadable), scrolling is choppy, detection of taps for hyperlinks is very inaccurate, their copy and paste barely works,… etc.
Apple probably approved this so that everybody can see how bad an application can be when it doesn’t use native frameworks and widgets; which goes back to their purported motives for the recent SDK changes.
It still works better than Opera Mini 5 on my mobile phone, picked up my bookmarks from that selection, and generally works okay.
I don’t expect excellence so I’m not disappointed but it fulfills my requirement of an alternate browser in case of security problems with Safari.
you are making an assumption that all those problems are a result of opera not using native frameworks(it it does) and with your logic, all applications written in native framework are 100% flawless, are they?.
lets all be honest and stop acting like an extended apple PR machine. Apple is a control freak and want absolute control over the runtime environment. Flash is banned primarily because it is a runtime environment apple cant control, the changes in SDK were made to stop people from depending on API apple doesnt control.
Flash has performance issue and flash spins can easily be made .. the SDK one just isnt supported by logic and your fails miserably.
And lets also be honest and stop bashing for the sake of bashing by understanding that this is, and always has been Apple’s model – tight control over the user experience – and it has served them well. While they don’t have the biggest market share they certainly have extremely loyal followers and consistently high approval ratings, and they have achieved that through UI consistency. This has been the way with MacOS so why should they change their model for the iDevices because “you + a few” want them to?
That logic and argument are very sound when you look at it from the perspective of Apple’s business model. I regularly see people labelled as Apple Zealots or Fanboys and talk about the RDF created by Jobs just because people have a positive view of Apple, but if you stand back and look at Apple logically as a corporation, taking away your pre-conceived notions and ingrained hatred of them (in other words your own RDF), you’ll see that they consistently follow a pattern that has made them one of the most recognised brands in the world with over 30 billion in the bank and a very loyal customer base. The majority of users use Apple stuff because they want to, not because they have no other choice, unlike other competing products. And you don’t have to like that pattern, it’s a free world (for the moment) and nobody’s forcing you to use their products.
But for them it’s not a bad position to be in, so what makes you think they should or would change it because a few geeks don’t like it?
yes, apple has a tight control over their products and it has served them well, i see no reason why they should change and i do not see how you though this is what i was saying. My complain is not with apple’s business model, my complain is with apple follower’s willingness to act like a a free extension of apple PR arm.
If you think apple like tight control and you are happy with it, why not simply say so?
Apple doesnt like flash. The reason given initially for why it was not allowed was because it was a memory hog and apple fanboy took this explanation and run with it. Adobe made flash compile to native code and the problem now with flash is with its cross platform nature and the fanboys are running with this explanation too. Why not just say “its a runtime control issue”? why can debate what purpose this control serves but we can atleast agree it is primarily a control issue and all other explanation are spins.
I do not have an ingrained hatred of apple..every company has a PR arm, apple’s arm seem to extend to their customers and i was drawing attention to this extension, why you though i was attacking apple and its successful business model is beyond me.
The app store approval process takes on average five days, so by that standard it took a long time.
But maybe it’s just me but on my iPod Touch, the web browser really isn’t the killer app. I don’t like surfing on a tiny screen and there are dedicated apps for everything I want to do online (mail, twitter, facebook, last.fm)
I feel the same way, but then I remember that my service provider probably already tracks what websites I visit. Also on my Android phone, Google probably has some hook on their browser so they can peak at my activities as well. Call me a tinfoil hat wearing guy.
I honestly don’t care though. Web browsing on a phone is not the same as on a PC, there’s a lot of websites I don’t go to on my phone.
When people reply to my OSAlert.com posts i get an email, the links don’t work on the Android Browser anyway so I never respond to replies on my phone.
I have a Samsung Moment, my friend an iPhone. He was giddy to have Opera on his phone. So we both installed it and loaded some webpages as fast as we could. Facebook /OSAlert /Slashdot /Drudge /Woot in that order. I made it to Woot while he was still loading OSAlert.
I am not a normal user of Opera, but I was impressed by the speed on my phone. I also didn’t see any lag scrolling and zooming. Honestly, I was impressed. If I could have adblock on this this it would be awesome. I cannot wait to try out Fennec.
I still don’t think I would use Opera on the desktop though.
I regularly use Opera on my Nokia 5800, which runs Symbian, and I am also very impressed of it since the release of the current version. It’s fast, works flawless and the user interface is almost perfect. In my view it’s better than Safari on the iPhone. The only two things that could be better are the zooming levels and flash support.
I really wonder if the iPhone version is that much different from the Symbian Version.
I use Opera Mini 4 and Opera Mini 5 beta 2 on my Sony-Ericsson w580i.
4 works beautifully, loads in under 3 seconds, has page-up/page-down (left/right arrow) support, and can handle all the news sites I throw at it.
5, on the other hand, takes 30 seconds to load, doesn’t have page-up/page-down, and takes longer to load each page. Looks nicer than 4, though, and supports multiple tabs. But it’s sluggish. Hopefully, the release version will be faster.
Compared to the included WAP browser, Opera Mini is awesome! Compared to a full-fledged Webkit-based browser? No idea. (Won’t be upgrading my phone until I see an Sony Xperia X10-mini Pro in Canada.)
If you’re looking for something similar to what opera does but with flash and video stuff you should look at skyfire. I’ve not tried it yet but what is cool is that not only do videos get scaled you download less data.
Skyfire’s user interface is horrible compared to Opera’s. Flash support is pretty useless using Skyfire. Playing flash videos is extremly choppy. Same for playing flash games. Even viewing flash sites is everything else than a pleasure. Summed up it only consumes bandwith, nothing else.
The only better thing is the rendering which is almost perfect. Never really had problems regarding the rendering of Opera, though. (it’s optimization of websites to the size of the screen is most times even better to use)
Flash lite using Nokia’s own browser it much better to use, btw.
My experience with Skyfire applies only to my Nokia 5800, though.
Indeed… One might criticize opera mini on the iPhone, but not without having in mind that :
-It’s their first release on the iPhone. Do you remember the first iPhone (EDGE) ? Was it that great, all in all ?
-The game is played according to apple’s rules. Which noticeably forbid opera from executing javascript and html code on the device. It’s pretty hard to make a good web browser when your concurrent abuses full control on the device you code on.
Yes it is fast, but it just doesn’t fit in on iPhone OS.
A lot of what makes the iPhone great is exactly what Apple UI is famous for. Consistency and well thought out UI controls.
The way scrolling doesn’t use acceleration/deceleration just makes it look/feel wrong.
Popup menus appear hidden beneath your finger on the home screen for example hold one of the spaces to popup the clear/edit menu and the menu appears hidden by your finger unlike OS copy/paste menu, magnifying glass etc.
Even what are basic list views and so should be UITableViews are non native, and so feature the odd scrolling.
Well, maybe there is hop… ouch… can’t say that, I know that there isn’t any…
This is great news. Finally, people can keep their bookmarks synced across multiple computers and iPhones; plus get more from their web allowance by using Opera’s compression.
To the people saying that Opera Mini on the iPhone isn’t that good: I’m pretty sure that Opera didn’t put 100% into the iPhone port because they were never sure whether it would be accepted into the App Store. Now that it’s been accepted, you can expect to see a lot more investment into the iPhone port.
Just recently gave Opera Mini a spin on my Blackberry 9700. Haven’t had too much experience with it yet, but it is much more enjoyable to use than the built-in Blackberry browser! When using WiFi, the speed difference is not as noticeable, Opera Mini really shines when I am running off AT&T’s network.