Opera Mini is approved

I didn’t think we would see this, but Opera Mini is now available for free in the App Store. Apple have rejected other browsers in the past, but Opera seem to have stayed within the rules of submission to get it in the door. As far as I know, they are doing all the rendering on their servers, compressing the data, then delivering it to the app via a modified version of Apples own UIWebview.

I’ve played around with it and my initial impressions are good. It loaded Engadget in seconds over 3G, whereas Mobile Safari took over 40 seconds to load the same page. It is really fast, but there are room for improvements.

> Pinch: Pinch to zoom doesn’t work well, if at all. Sometimes it just doesn’t zoom, and when it does it looks nasty. It’s also all or nothing – you can’t zoom half way into a page then stop.

> Scroll to Top: Unlike Safari, you can’t tap the iPhone status bar to scroll the view to the top of the current webpage.

> Space: With the extra toolbar at the top and the bottom of the screen, you get less viewable real estate than Safari (why not make the titlebar disappear like the URL bar when I scroll down the page guys?). [edit: you can choose fullscreen mode in settings. Thanks to Paul for pointing this out]

> Overview: When a page loads, the overview (zoomed out fully) screen is not at all readable. Let’s compare Engadget on Opera vs Safari:

Opera vs Safari

Overall, I can’t see Opera replacing Mobile Safari for me. Although I’m sure there will be times when I’m in low, EDGE only, coverage areas (sort it out O2), and I will certainly be using Opera to make the web usable.

In general, it reminds me of mobile internet 5 years ago, when I used Opera Mini on my old Sony Ericsson. T610. It was good, but not good enough.