Opera For iPhone To Test Apple's Resolve

Forced to include in EU? by DarkHorseman · 2010-02-10 01:59 · Score: 2, Insightful

First! (Presumably) I wonder how this will play out in EU where MS was forced to include multiple browsers...

Re:Forced to include in EU? by Carewolf · 2010-02-10 02:03 · Score: 3, Insightful

First! (Presumably) I wonder how this will play out in EU where MS was forced to include multiple browsers...
Microsoft was forced to do so after being convicted of anti-competitive behaviour. The differences between Apple and Microsoft aside, Apple would be no more forced to apply by the same rules as Microsoft, than you are forced to spent the rest of your days in prison, just because someone else was sentenced that for their crime.
Re:Forced to include in EU? by biryokumaru · 2010-02-10 02:05 · Score: 1, Insightful

Apple would be no more forced to apply by the same rules as Microsoft, than you are forced to spent the rest of your days in prison, just because someone else was sentenced that for their crime.
Or rather, because someone else was sentenced for the same crime you've committed.

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When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Re:Forced to include in EU? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-02-10 02:09 · Score: 1, Insightful

MicroSoft is not a monopoly either (there are many other choices for PC operating systems), but that didn't help them.
Re:Forced to include in EU? by RedK · 2010-02-10 02:18 · Score: 4, Insightful

Microsoft is very much a Monopoly. The fact that there are other products on the market doesn't change that. It's about market control and position. If Microsoft tomorrow decides that a particular OEM cannot sell Windows, that OEM is dead. If Microsoft decides that a particular business can't run Windows, that particular business as just lost a lot of its data and many of its applications won't run anymore, leaving them dead in the water.

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"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Re:Forced to include in EU? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-02-10 02:43 · Score: 2, Insightful

a more correct wording would be: microsoft was convicted of shady business practices, and got a "exit of jail free" card with a "we will watch you" condition attached. and this is exactly what is happening.

no law require interoperability and openness of platforms. some states don't punish reverse engineering in the wake of interoperability, but that is another story.
Re:Forced to include in EU? by Grimbleton · 2010-02-10 03:06 · Score: 3, Insightful

But they didn't do that. In any way. They simply didn't include everyone else's browser by default.
Re:Forced to include in EU? by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · 2010-02-10 03:34 · Score: 5, Insightful

Apple would be no more forced to apply by the same rules as Microsoft, than you are forced to spent the rest of your days in prison, just because someone else was sentenced that for their crime.
Or rather, because someone else was sentenced for the same crime you've committed.
It's sad to see comments like yours modded up because they simply indicate how prevalent and popular ignorance is. Your problem and the problem with everyone who modded you up is that you don't know what crime MS was convicted of, or at least what that crime is. MS was convicted of the crime of antitrust abuse, where they undermined the operation of the free market. Apple, not having sufficient influence on any related market, doesn't even have ability to commit this crime with regard to browsers.
Its like someone arguing everyone who goes to the range and fires a pistol should be arrested for murder because they believe murder means "shooting a gun" because someone who shot someone with a gun was convicted of murder. Additionally, they're too willfully ignorant to go educate themselves before spouting off.
Re:Forced to include in EU? by Richthofen80 · 2010-02-10 03:51 · Score: 2, Insightful

>It's not the same thing in practice, though. The actions of a corporation with a near monopoly on the market have different repurcussions than the same actions performed by a minority player
That's kind of a horseshit argument. That's like saying that if a poor minority smokes crack, its worse because he makes less money and it has a larger impact on his family; but if a rich white guy does it, it's less of a big deal since he's rich and he's not influencing his neighbors and setting a bad example.
Shouldn't the law be blind to the status of the offender? Shouldn't the action itself be the only arbiter of what is a crime, and not the action biased by WHO is committing it? I think it is a terrible precedent to have two sets of laws, one for the 'little guy' and one for the 'big guy'. Then it becomes a less objective 'which guy am I', not 'what actions can I perform'.

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Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
Re:Forced to include in EU? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-02-10 04:18 · Score: 1, Insightful

If Microsoft tomorrow decides that a particular OEM cannot sell Windows, that OEM is dead.
Apple seem to do alright.

If Microsoft decides that a particular business can't run Windows, that particular business as just lost a lot of its data and many of its applications won't run anymore, leaving them dead in the water.
MicroSoft can't take a business's paid-for copies of Windows away from it. Businesses can and do decide to migrate from Windows to one of the many available alternatives and, yes, there is a cost to this. But so what? There is a cost to a business in changing its vending machines from Coke to Pepsi.
Re:Forced to include in EU? by amicusNYCL · 2010-02-10 05:47 · Score: 2, Insightful

Are you trying to assert that no update has ever reset the default browser, or just that you haven't installed one that did? If the latter is true, who cares?

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"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Re:Forced to include in EU? by Swift2001 · 2010-02-10 08:17 · Score: 2, Insightful

If a company is found guilty of monopolistic behavior, the law allows them to be broken up, sold, or disposed of in any way the judge deems correct. In fact, Judge Jackson's suggested restructuring would have resulted in three companies that would have each had a clear mandate. The software division would have concentrated on applications like the Office suite. The OS division would have developed more interoperable systems based on standards, because they wouldn't have been large enough to bully the rest of the world. Still quite large, though. The hardware division might have had a chance against the iPod, because they would have gotten off their asses and had to succeed. The Xbox would have had to survive on its own, and not be able to be sold as a loss leader.
After the company has been found guilty and a remedy -- fine or whatever -- is proposed, the entity is under court scrutiny, like an individual released on probation. For a parolee, talking to the wrong person is enough to put you back in jail, even if it wouldn't be an offense to anyone else.
Re:Forced to include in EU? by hazydave · 2010-02-10 19:12 · Score: 2, Insightful

You've been drinkin' the Apple kool-aid. They don't give a flyin' frack about "security problems" or slowdowns due to Java on the iPhone. Which, in fact, don't exist -- every other major smart phone supports Java, some (including Blackberry and Android) are based on Java, and suffer no performance problems.
Any time Apple is called to task on any mis-feature of the iPhone, they cry "stability", "security", and "performance". But the reality is, they want to control competition. They want all competition routed through their control, so they can bless or curse any iPhone application, and ensure they make money on any for-profit app. If they allow Java to run, it will offer an alternate means of running apps, one not controlled by Apple. So they don't allow it. Or Flash, for the very same reasons. Or multitasking, which would then allow any old company to do the things only Apple can do today... for example, build a music player than runs while you're browsing the web or playing a game. Today, only Apple can do that.
All of these things work just dandy on Apple's competition, proving beyond question that Apple's just making this stuff up, so average Joe's don't discover their real motivation.

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-Dave Haynie
Re:Forced to include in EU? by hazydave · 2010-02-10 19:44 · Score: 2, Insightful

"The rest of us"... well, aren't WE the monopoly today.
You're incorrect, and also, incorrect about "a crime is a crime". Anyone can be anti-competitive. It's only illegal for a monopoly to do so. Period. The monopoly itself is not illegal, only certain behaviors, and only once you've been recognized as a monopoly.
Sure, you may be a market leader at 17% of a market, but you don't have any special ability to influence that market, limit others' competing within that market, or to use your powers in that market to help conquer another... you have plenty of competition.
So let's look at Apple... are there competitors? A-plenty.. they have a healthy but limited portion of the US smart phone market (about 25%).. they're not even dominant here, RIM is at 42%, as of December 2009. Globally, they only have about a 12% share. So there is plenty of competition. Dozens of companies make cellphones and smart phones. Thus, there is no monopoly of any kind in this market. So anyone in it can be as anti-competitive as they like, it might affect their sales, but it doesn't substantially affect the market as a whole.
Other signs of monopoly powers... Apple using their pricing to drive competition out of business? Nope... in fact, they keep their prices relatively high. Are they preventing other companies from entering the smartphone market? Nope... several companies entered the smartphone market in the last year, including Dell and Acer.
Is Apple seeing price pressure from other companies? This is impossible if they're any sort of monopoly... a very good example is Microsoft. Microsoft still gets $100-$500 or more for an operating system, despite the fact that in much of the rest of the OS market, the price of an OS has been reduced to zero. Many competitors were either driven out of the OS market (Be, Inc. for example) or forced to offer their OS free (Sun), at least on the PC desktop level. But Apple is in fact starting to see very real price pressure. This caused them to introduce a $100 (with subsidy) iPhone model in the past year.
If you're not a monopoly, there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be able to participate in a free market to the best of your ability. The reason monopolies are illegal in most countries is simple: those societies value free markets, and create laws to help ensure markets stay free. There's no such thing as a perfectly free market, of course.. there's always some barrier to entry, always some product differentiation, which is fine. When a company gets powerful enough to change a formerly free market into one they substantially control, they get reigned in on those controls. Or they get broken up. Laws are intended to be expressions of the values of the greater society.
You should learn more about this stuff before going off about "all of us here" believing as you do. Some of us are actually educated on these points, and understand why Apple is obviously not a monopoly. And in fact, their behavior in the iTunes store, anti-competitive as it is relative their little fiefdom on the iPhone, is actually proving very good for their competition. Android, for example, is the fastest growing smartphone platform right now, and at least some of that's in response to Apple's behaviors. If they had a true monopoly, such behavior would not help their competition or hurt their sales. But it does.
The Wikipedia article is actually pretty good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

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-Dave Haynie

Confused? I certainly am... by Shrike82 · 2010-02-10 02:04 · Score: 3, Insightful

We have not submitted Opera Mini to the Apple App store

Really? Then what the hell is this story about? I read the article through a number of times, but that sentence really doesn''t make any sense. Are they targetiing this at jailbroken phones? Was that quote from some time ago and was unwisely used here?

Perhaps I just need some caffeine, or is my confusion shared by others?

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You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!

Re:Confused? I certainly am... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-02-10 02:41 · Score: 4, Insightful

Opera is publicly announcing their intention to submit their browser to Apple before actually committing to the process, because they know they stand a good chance of summary rejection for trying to break into the Safari monopoly. Opera hopes to preempt Apple's choice in the matter by raising public support in advance of the submission and raising in conjunction with that support awareness of Apple's monopolistic methodologies, preparing the public to view Apple's coming rejection as the act of an Evil Fascist Corporate Overlord (whether it is or not is irrelevant; we're talking about Opera's intentions here, not Apple's). Their hopes are that, should Apple realize the public has been thus prepared, Opera might be more likely to pass the submission process to avoid the storm of negative publicity that would fall out of a realization and fulfillment of that media preparation. In other words, this is manufactured opinion, and Slashdot is the medium of manufacturing outrage on behalf of one corporation against another (regardless of your feelings towards either company) because Slashdot is a public forum where corporate media services can advertise against one another.
Opera suffers from a kind of hubris, though: they don't realize that the audience who will listen to them is smaller than they need to generate sufficient public outrage to press Apple on any decision and far smaller than needed to drown out the Apple supporters who will regurgitate or themselves even generate, given sufficient creativity, reasons why Apple Is Right And You Are Wrong. The Opera FanBois are fewer than the Apple FanBois and by a sufficient margin that Opera is not going to win this PR turf war. But Slashdot is a cheap place to advertise, so it doesn't hurt to try.
Re:Confused? I certainly am... by huckamania · 2010-02-10 04:08 · Score: 2, Insightful

It is true that there are orders of magnitude more Apple FanBois then Opera FanBois.
However, almost everyone likes choice and virtually no one likes being denied choice. I can't imagine that the EU could be very happy about this lack of choice, product tie in, extreme control and customer lock in. I seem to remember the EU having some tough laws applying to this sort of thing but maybe they only come into effect if MS is involved. I suspect once the numbers reach a certain point, millions or billions, it will become more difficult not to sanction this behavior with a fine and some crazy restitution.
Re:Confused? I certainly am... by hazydave · 2010-02-10 21:18 · Score: 2, Insightful

Fanboys aren't the real issue here... Opera's being pretty clever here. They're announcing this, knowing full well that "Apple rejects App" will garner far more publicity than "Opera releases browser". There is a large segment of the electronic computer press, and perhaps even some print media still, that's just crazy obsessed with every little move Apple makes. Google too, for sure, and maybe all this only because Microsoft has been relatively boring lately.. they haven't eaten a baby or kicked a puppy in months.
It works for them either way, because they're making this all about Apple. If Apple rejects it, there will be press about it, just like Apple rejecting Google Voice... Opera's high profile enough, and as I pointed out, the computer industry press is just crazy hungry for Apple stories. If they accept it, then it's also big news, because it'll be the first major browser (Opera isn't big on the desktop, but Opera Mini is major in the cellphone world) accepted to the iTunes store. And presumably, the first that's not based on all the same components as Safari.

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-Dave Haynie

It does not violate SDK terms by porneL · 2010-02-10 02:13 · Score: 5, Insightful

It could be accepted.

Apple forbids code interpreters other than Apple's own, BUT this is Opera Mini, not full Opera Mobile. Mini executes JavaScript server-side and only sends rendered result to the phone. There's likely no (turing-complete) interpreter on iPhone side, so it should be fine within terms of SDK.

Apple has already accepted number of WebKit-based browsers, so browsers in general aren't forbidden.

And for iPhone users, especially on EDGE, there is very good reason to use Opera Mini: it's going to be faster. iPhones before 3GS are also very low on RAM, and Safari only uses RAM for caching. Presumably Opera Mini would be able to keep many more tabs open and fully cached.

Re:It does not violate SDK terms by cerberusss · 2010-02-10 03:51 · Score: 2, Insightful

Big question for me is whether or not you can turn off image loading.
My feeling is that the network speed is not the problem, but rather the iPhone rendering speed is. Safari on the iPhone, plus a heavy JavaScript page, means waiting for me. Graphics, not so much.

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8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?

Re:Opera Mini? by quadelirus · 2010-02-10 02:34 · Score: 5, Insightful

Apple does not allow developers to develop in Java. You can use a cross compiler to compile from java to Objective-C, but I doubt this is why Opera went with Mini. As I understand it, Opera Mini executes JavaScript on Opera's servers, renders the page and sends a rendered version to the browser. If this is true, it sheds light on why Opera is doing Mini. It does it because Opera Mobile would require a full-fledged javascript interpreter and Apple will not allow an app to provide a platform for scripting or arbitrary code execution. Opera Mobile will not be on the iPhone until this policy changes, but Opera Mini might just be able to get around this restriction.

Re:Opera Mini? by Infiniti2000 · 2010-02-10 02:38 · Score: 5, Insightful

Web pages are processed by Opera's proxy servers and stripped down for mobile viewing on underpowered devices.

If Opera reduces the bandwidth to the iPhone, then AT&T should be on the front line encouraging Apple to accept the app!

Re:What about opera mobile? by sznupi · 2010-02-10 02:39 · Score: 3, Insightful

Uhm, Opera Mini is primarily an app for more then a billion or so "feature phones" out there, the ones with j2me; it gives them rather nice browsing experience (especially since many have slow data access and/or data costs are very high)

So of course it will be less featured, that's the point - having a sensible browser on devices which were thought uncapable of running one at all.

That said, latest Opera Mini 5 beta releases show great progress.

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One that hath name thou can not otter

Re:Opera is lousy from my experience, please go aw by Rhaban · 2010-02-10 03:01 · Score: 4, Insightful

I really wish Opera would just go away already. I'm quite happy with IE8/Safari4/Firefox3 lineage no more players needed thank you.

Opera has the source of most big innovations in browsers for quite some years now. If it disappeared, where would firefox addons developpers find ideas of new features to implement?

Re:Well, Opera Mini isn't strictly a browser... by darthflo · 2010-02-10 03:02 · Score: 3, Insightful

By using any of their binaries on the same system you do whatever it is you do on encrypted web pages, you trust whomever compiled that binary implicitly. The end-to-"end" encryption of Opera Mini terminates at an Opera, ASA server. The end-to-end encryption of Opera (Desktop) terminates at the control of just that closed-source browser. If they were in it to fuck you over, well, they can.
The same applies to MSIE and Safari (even more, since they're distributed by the OS manufacturers), Chrome (a lot; seeing how much data is exchanged between a typical computer and Google's servers, a lot could be hidden somewhere in there), Firefox (slightly less because development is more visible and done by Mozilla, Google only bankrolls it), for binary-distributions.

Re:EU/FCC wont do a thing by tepples · 2010-02-10 03:22 · Score: 1, Insightful

What laws exist that prohibit you from designing, building and selling your own cellphone complete with an appstore service?

GSM patents, FCC's existing exclusive allocations of spectrum, etc.

Re:Well, Opera Mini isn't strictly a browser... by nedlohs · 2010-02-10 03:39 · Score: 3, Insightful

You are running a software built by said commercial 3rd-party company. They don't need that server in the middle to see all of those things.

So there's no increase in capability if they are malicious. There is an increase in risk if they are incompetent - and do something like cache requests/responses containing that data.

Re:EU/FCC wont do a thing by Anonymous Coward · 2010-02-10 03:54 · Score: 1, Insightful

GSM patents

These are not laws. You would license them like everyone else.

FCC's existing exclusive allocations of spectrum

Huh? What does this have to do with making a phone?

Your reply is fucking dumb as shit.

Re:Well, Opera Mini isn't strictly a browser... by toleraen · 2010-02-10 04:01 · Score: 2, Insightful

But it isn't just the Opera software you have to worry about, you have to worry about the host OS being secure as well. I know the security settings on my system at home, and I can be reasonably certain that there aren't any viruses, trojans, malware, etc on it. Plus from a targeting standpoint my little linux box at home is peanuts.
However, Opera's servers are sitting out in the open with thousands of devices connecting to it to get all sorts of information. That's a sweet target for hackers. How can I trust that their servers haven't been hacked to death and all my red data isn't being sniffed between encryption methods?

Re:But if Apple does it, then it's okay by Duradin · 2010-02-10 04:08 · Score: 4, Insightful

Microsoft doesn't make and/or sell their own computers. Windows goes on other companies' machines. Microsoft used agreements with those other companies to their advantage against other OS vendors.

Apple makes their own computer. Apple only puts their OS on their computers. Apple's app store only sells to Apple's own hardware. Apple allows competition between products. You can easily chose not to buy an Apple product and live a happy Apple free life. Apple does not allow competition within its products. It's Apple's store for Apple's hardware. Why should any other company have say over what is and isn't on Apple's store for its own products?

If you can't see the difference between Microsoft's dealings with OEMs and Apple wanting control over Apple product lines you must have some pretty hefty blinders on.

Re:But if Apple does it, then it's okay by Moldiver · 2010-02-10 04:17 · Score: 2, Insightful

The knowledge of what is a monopoly and what's not appears to be not clear for many people...

Re:EU/FCC wont do a thing by Anonymous Coward · 2010-02-10 07:05 · Score: 1, Insightful

Apple introduced DRM-free tracks in iTunes not long after few European countries expressed the possibility of blocking iTunes outright (not saying that was the only possible reason)

Bullshit. Apple introduced DRM-free tracks in iTunes not long after Apple was able to convince the Music Industry that DRM was stupid.

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