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

Re:Meh

[rbb]

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.

Re:Meh

[Guspaz]

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.

Re:Meh

[CxDoo]

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'.