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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."
Apple will say that it duplicates existing iPhone functions and will refuse to accept it.
But lets all keep saying Microsoft is evil.
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
from the thats-not-gonna-work dept.
Publicize it like they (and you) are doing and actually it just might work. Dare Apple look any more evil than their dictatorship at the app store has made them out to be?
My work here is dung.
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.
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.
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
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
Actually, there's a video showing it to be quite a bit faster than Safari in a side-by-side comparison.
In God We Trust, Others We Monitor
Just to clarify my point, it is practically a browser but it contains no rendering engine.
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
I don't know if it will ever match the speed of Safari
Apparently you didn't RTFA or watch the included youtube video. Opera Mini loaded 5 pages in the same time as it took Safari to load 1. Of course it does that using compression.
You can read more about the compression technology here. It's somewhat similar to Opera Turbo for dialup users, but much more efficient:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_mini#Functionality
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
It more than matches the speed of Safari, it destroys it. Safari is a traditional browser; establish a connection to the web server (some round trips right there), request and download the requested HTML page (another round trip), download any first-tier needed assets (JS, CSS, images, etc) (likely not all done in parallel, more round trips), download any second-tier assets (example, images from CSS, anything dynamically written by the JS, etc), and so on. All in all, you're probably adding in dozens of round trips at the least. The latency on the 3G link alone (ignoring internet latency) is probably 100+ms for a round trip, so you're adding multiple seconds worth of latency just by being on 3G.
Opera, on the other hand, does absolutely everything server-side. Any requests are being made from a connection that isn't sitting on the other side of a 100+ms wireless link, and they probably do a lot of caching on top of that. The actual data is sent to the client browser in the minimum number of round trips; enough to establish the connection and make the request. All content comes back in one single compressed glob. A page that might have taken 10 seconds to load before can suddenly load in half a second.
There are downsides, of course, to having no client-side javascript. Most web apps require connections to the server to do what was before a local operation. You're effectively streaming any changes to the page from the server to the client (presumably keeping the connection open while looking at the page in case any changes need to be sent), and this is not ideal.
Unfortunately, it's mandatory; Apple won't allow javascript execution locally.
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.
My guess is Opera have no hope of getting it approved, buyt are starting to build a case to force the iGarden open the same way they forced the Wintel one. Will take a while, though.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
The video is misleading. The Opera side begins browsing and clicking on links before the page is done loading, thus the entire page is not loaded, but they count the page twoards the total.
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.
Safari is a traditional browser; establish a connection to the web server (some round trips right there), request and download the requested HTML page (another round trip), download any first-tier needed assets (JS, CSS, images, etc) (likely not all done in parallel, more round trips), download any second-tier assets (example, images from CSS, anything dynamically written by the JS, etc), and so on. All in all, you're probably adding in dozens of round trips at the least.
Hasn't worked that way since HTTP v1.0, when each thing you wanted had to be requested individually, which sucked which is why they changed it. Now browsers can request many elements at once, and the server can send them all back in the same stream. There are multiple round trips needed for establishing the connection and making the initial http request, and any elements that the browser only knows it needs until after processing a script of course have to wait for the script to be received and processed. But there should not be seconds of latency merely due to mandatory round-trip times because there aren't that many.
Obviously the way Opera does it is still going to be way faster.
The enemies of Democracy are
Instead of entering the discussion on what the meaning of "render" is I will just point out that Opera Mini is useless without access to "proxy farm".
Try to access a web site not available from outside you network (e.g. wifi router cfg page) - not possible.
Try to open saved html page - ditto.
Can't render shit on its own? Yup, that's your 'very fast rendering engine'.
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
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.
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.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.