Following years of development, tweaking, tinkering, accusations of censorship and obsessive reading of the App Store guidelines, Norwegian company Opera Software has finally managed to create a version of its mobile browser -- Opera Mini -- that Apple has deemed acceptable to release on the iPhone. What swung it for Opera was the argument that it doesn't render web pages directly -- it instead displays a custom representation of that page from the company's servers.
The advantage this gives Opera over the default Safari browser is that it can modify that page in the process -- dialling down the file size of large images, and compressing the code so that it loads far faster for the user, and eats into less of you inclusive data allowance than Safari.
It works, too. When you're connected to Wi-Fi you won't notice much of a difference between Opera and Safari in terms of speed. But if you're suffering on a flaky EDGE connection then the speed boost in loading pages is real and noticeable. If you frequently find yourself with poor phone signal, you'll really appreciate this feature.
Other advantages over Safari include a useful "speed dial" homepage for quick access to your nine most visited sites, a handy function to search for text in a page, URL auto-complete, the ability to choose from multiple search engines -- including site-specific ones -- and the ability to save pages for offline viewing. The tabbed browsing experience is also far more pleasant to use than on Safari, and you can open as many tabs as your phone can cope with, as opposed to the maximum of eight allowed by Safari.
But it's not all flowers smiling bunny faces. The gesture support is poor at best: Pinching is erratic and only seems to support two zoom levels. Copying and pasting require an extra step over Safari too, you can't set it as a default browser (meaning links from, say, email will always open Safari, not Opera), and the UI and toolbars don't match other applications. We also found that many pages render incorrectly, rendering some sites almost unusable. Javascript support is average at best as well.
So ultimately, while you might want to keep Opera around for when you find yourself in a low-signal area, Safari is still the best browser for the majority of situations. But that doesn't matter -- the real story here is Apple's acceptance of an alternative to one of its own pieces of software. We now know possible to create a better browser than Safari.
It's just a shame that Opera Mini for iPhone isn't quite it. Yet...
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