Opera Mini For iPhone Submitted To App Store Today

An anonymous reader writes "Opera Mini for iPhone was officially submitted to the Apple iPhone App store today. A select few first saw it at Mobile World Congress 2010 in February. Now, the 'fast like a rocket' browser is taking its first big step towards giving users a new way to browse on the iPhone."

Comments

DOA

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Apple will say that it duplicates existing iPhone functions and will refuse to accept it.

But lets all keep saying Microsoft is evil.

Re:DOA

[whisper_jeff]

You keep using this word evil but I don't think you know what it means.

Creating a "walled garden" for an app store is _NOT_ evil. Deal with it. In case you hadn't noticed, virtually every store on the planet practices that every day. They don't just stock products because they exist - they only stock products that match their store's motif if they think they can sell it. Sorry. Not evil. Totally, utterly, not evil.

Just because you don't like it doesn't make it "evil".

Re:DOA

[DragonWriter]

Apple will say that it duplicates existing iPhone functions and will refuse to accept it.

But lets all keep saying Microsoft is evil.

Apple has made that rule clear [...]

They've stated it lots of times as a reason for rejecting things, sure, but often while allowing other things that are just as duplicative of the same core functionality as the the thing rejected with that stated reason.

So, either they are just extremely inconsistent in enforcing the rule, or the "rule" is just an excuse.

Re:DOA

[Chris Burke]

Most businesses can't just tell someone else entering their market "nope, that would compete with us, you can't do that."

Uh yes most businesses can say "nope" to a competitor who wants to sell their product through the businesses' own store.

Lowes doesn't sell Home Depot's brand of power tools; Best Buy doesn't sell computers using Fry's brand of motherboards. The brick-and-mortar Apple store doesn't sell Windows-based PCs. All shocking instances of anti-competitive behavior, I know. :P

Apple isn't an open platform. Deal with it.

[elrous0]

Yeah, and Apple is going to remove it "fast as a rocket" too.

Steve doesn't compete. He tells you what you can have, and you either accept it or you don't. If you don't like it, go buy a Droid.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

If Opera figures out how to get flash support into the damn thing, I expect that no amount of reality distortion will be able to protect Jobs from the wrath of the users should they reject the app.

Opera Marketing Win

[VoxMagis]

Whether accepted or not, Opera has gained a lot of basically free publicity with this. That's what it is about, and good for them.

I am not absolutely sure that Apple will reject it. If I was Apple though, I would make them change the name to, for example, 'Opera Web Viewer', and not allow it to access https pages at all. Then they get to claim user-security and still let this thing in.

I love Opera and all, but I'm not sure I would use it myself. I'll look at it when it's available, no reason to worry until then.

Re:Duplicate Functionality?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you run Firefox on your Nintendo Wii? No, only Opera.

This is a non-story because it's a closed platform and there's nothing surprising about it. Not because "OMG THERES A PLATFORM THAT ISNT OPEN TO EVERYTHING Q.Q"

Re:Meh

[CxDoo]

Just to clarify my point, it is practically a browser but it contains no rendering engine.

Re:Meh

[mike260]

I don't think they render the page to a bitmap, but rather preprocess the HTML+CSS to generate a fixed layout, which is much simpler (=faster) for the client to render.
But if that is indeed what they're doing, I dunno how they deal with animating elements (which would require the entire layout to be recalculated frame-by-frame).

Apple, please reject this quickly

[Anonymous Coward]

I really hope Apple rejects it quickly so Opera tosses it up on the jailbroken software distribution channels (Cydia/Rock). All the more stuff to show my friends to get them interested in breaking Apple's chokehold on their hardware.

It's not like I'd refuse to use it if it was on the Apple Store, I'd actually be rather happy if it was for all the people who choose not to jailbreak, but I imagine that Opera is waiting to see if they get Apple's blessing before rolling it out by other means. And I bet that Apple will likely delay their "decision" as long as possible (indefinitely?) until people/media forget about it, then quietly deny it if pushed to a decision.

Re:Force Their Hand

[EvanED]

It's the exact same thing Microsoft did on Windows.

No it's not... it's not even close, really. You give one of the reasons yourself -- the monopoly thing. But beyond that, MS never prevented 3rd party browsers from running on the system. Even at the height of IE dominance (both in terms of market share and even, IMO for a short time, quality), it was never hard to run other browsers on Windows.

This is entirely different from the iPhone situation, where Apple doesn't just get to decide what you see by default, but can entirely prevent you (without jailbreaking) from running a particular program for no technical reason whatsoever.

Re:Force Their Hand

[Low Ranked Craig]

Apple doesn't care what a tiny minority of geeks thinks. If they did the iPad would have 2 cameras, 4 media card slots, 5 usb ports, 2 removable batteries, a combo OLED / eInk screen and would run Linux. And it would cost under $300.

Re:Meh

[node 3]

I'd give it a try if Apple 'blessed' it (which I doubt they will considering how 'fair' they are) but I don't know if it will ever match the speed of Safari considering they don't have access to the private API's that Apple does (and forbids everyone else from using).

What API's would those be? Safari uses WebKit, just like any other app on the iPhone that wants to serve up web pages.

As far as WebKit goes, what do you suppose it can do that some other rendering engine won't be able to do? It can be written in C, can use OpenGL (as well as things like CoreAnimation)...

So, really, what super-secret APIs are you thinking of here?

Apple keeps APIs private for only two reasons:

1. They aren't finished yet.
2. Security/Privacy.

As for the "fairness" of Apple, and whether they'll approve Opera, they probably won't. It's not because (like so many people think) that they don't want the competition, it's because they believe Safari is the best browser out there, and want to keep the iPhone experience fairly consistent in terms of core functionality.

Re:Meh

[mjwx]

1:17 - page stops loading when screen is pressed.
1:26 - browsing begins before page is finished loading, appears to end when pressed.
1:33 - page stops loading when screen is pressed. (full page does appear to load however)
1:44 - page stops loading when screen is pressed.
1:53 - page loads completely

It looks fast, but still misleading.

So...

It complies with Apple's code of advertising then.

Just to be pedantic, users don't wait until a page is fully loaded before trying to use it, so getting a page to the point where it is displayed and barely usable is more important then having the whole thing loaded.