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Apple Approves Opera Mini For iPhone
andylim writes "Opera today announced its popular mobile browser, Opera Mini, has been approved for iPhone and iPod touch on the App Store. Opera Mini will be available in less than 24 hours, market by market, as a free download. Here's the download URL for when it goes live."
how did opera get this through the app store approval process!?
...all powerful application overlord, for your unending generosity. How shall we ever repay you?
The summary suggests that this has yet to be released, although the reviews on the linked site are all negative and all complain that Opera isn't as good as Safari. How do they know?.. Am I missing something?
And it seems to be incredibly fast. However, incredibly insecure from what I've heard. Also, the iPhone auto-correct for typing does not seem to work.
With the [internet browsing] improvements that the Opera browser brings, maybe iPhone users will have less chances to notice how flaky AT&T's service is, thus raising the overall satisfaction level with Apple and AT&T.
Opera had already submitted its Opera Mini browser for iPhone and it was rejected. ...
Get your facts straight before you start kissing Steve Jobs
it hass passed without any hassle and is now available for everyone, so there's really nothing going on at all.
Whilst the positive press around Opera's browser does certainly generate interest in it, it would be a mistake to conclude from this that Apple is a benevolent dictator which treats apps equally when they compete with its own. Did you consider that one of the reasons the Opera browser may have being accepted is because of the attention that Opera brought to the subject? It is certainly possible that Apple's decision to allow the app would have been affected by the fact that Opera is a European company involved in a high-profile ongoing EU antitrust case regarding web browsers. Rejecting the app would probably have triggered an antitrust complaint from Opera, and that is the kind of attention that Apple could do without.
I've used it on Windows Mobile, Symbian, BlackBerry OS, Android and will definitely try it on iPhone OS later this day. So, with Opera Mini you may get consistent browsing experience no matter what smartphone (or featurephone) you choose.
Opera Mini is indeed a simple viewer for images remotely calculated on Opera servers.
This has the advantage of lowering the data transmitted to your phone (actually cost-effective if you are volume-limited), and the disadvantage of providing some unexpected behaviors whenever local things like active buttons etc. are expected to be loaded on your device (I say *some*)
In fact Opera also offers a full browser, named Opera Mobile, on all sorts of phones (on my Nokia for instance, aside Nok's one), but that one, Mobile, isn't ported on the iPhone. Wonder why ;-)
Herve S.
...it will probably be approved.
And to those not understanding the Flash issue, it really is about revenue. By allowing Flash, it removes authorization control from Apple. Like it or not, Apple maintains control, and will continue to maintain control. Anything that removes control will be rejected. Don't like it, move to another platform.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
If you understand how Opera Mini works and why Apple bans other browsers (hint: it is not because they retrieve and display web pages) you would not find this surprising at all.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
I have Opera Mini installed on my Android phone, and I believe it is no threat to the Safari browser, as it does not support multi-touch and is generally not as sophisticated. It is very useful when only a slow network connection is available; however, I feel that if that is not the case, Safari will stay superior.
It would be a freaking miracle if Opera Mobile (the complete Opera browser, that exists for ALL smartphones but Apple's) would be accepted on the iPhone.
But indeed, Opera didn't even try to propose it. They dared propose a simple remote viewer, Opera Mini.
Contrary for instance to my Nokia N97mini which features the original Nokia browser and let me replace it with Opera Mobile, the iPhone is probably the only platform where no other browser will be allowed (nor even proposed).
So, yes, some call it freaking...
Herve S.
If you guys want a better browser download the 99 cent Atomic Browser. It has tabbed browsing (and opens tabs in the background if you want it to), and you can load as many tabs as you want. With Mobile Safari you're limited to like 8 "windows" I think. With Atomic Browser not only can you open as many as you want, but when you switch back to the first tabs you opened it doesn't reload the page like Mobile Safari does (Safari kicks old windows out of RAM to make room for new ones, forcing you to reload when you return to the page, Atomic Browser keeps them all loaded. This is more noticeable with the iPad where you're lucky to get 4-5 pages before Mobile Safari starts reloading old ones). The only downside to Atomic Browser is that when you close the app and open it back up, it reloads every tab. I spoke with the developer about it, and he says it is a limitation of the iPhone SDK, but the new "saved state" feature in iPhone OS 4.0 may allow for him to keep the tabs between sessions without having to reload them.
If you don't want to pay the buck download the free version which has some limitations but it gives you a good sense of the browser.
Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with this developer I just recently found this app and am telling everyone about it because it is leaps and bounds ahead of Mobile Safari.
Do any of the other browsers use their own rendering engines (and javascript interpreters), or are they just different frontends for the built-in WebKit?
d/ld and installed last night. first impressions: renders pages better than safari (faint praise), very customizable, has pressure issues with touch screen (iTouch).
verdict: good start but needs improvements, which opera historically provides in a timely fashion. will be using this extensively.
- js.
With the release of any iPhone / iPad app, the announcement really needs to end with the phrase, "for now." That is, the app has somehow been accepted by the current byzantine App Store approval process, but a future byzantine App Store decision may pull the app and confuse developers and customers alike. It's happened often enough that this should be a clear footnote on all App Store stories.
[
This isn't true, not at all. The concept of another web browser on the iPhone or iPad is prohibited due to how they use the API. It's the same reason Firefox for iPhone won't be approved. But Opera has gotten around this limitation by using their proxy servers to render the webpage on their servers and send it back to the iPhone.
You do understand that this is Opera Mini, and not the real Opera browser? There's a massive difference between the two.
There sure is. Regular Opera goes up to 11 but Opera Mini only goes up to 10.
I take the point - but for antitrust issues to apply, Apple would have to have a monopoly on phones, which they most certainly do not.
2008:
http://www.unwiredview.com/2008/10/30/opera-mini-for-iphone-rejected-by-apple-from-app-store/
Now you know more.
They all use Webkit, which is in the rules for the store.
I seem to remember the last time discussions of web browsers on the iPhone though, that the overriding "common knowledge" was that there were *no* browsers other than Safari on the iPhone, when a quick search would show that there were plenty.
You can't bring alternative render engines, you have to use the version of WebKit that is already there, but it's not like this is the first alternative web browser for the iPhone, as the summary is inferring. It's more accurate to say that its the first alternative browser that uses a different engine, by tunnelling all the traffic to a remote server.
Hush, you fool! Do you want to invoke the wrath of Father Steve?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
A quick search yields several articles from 2008 that mention Opera Mini being rejected from the Apps store.
OK, so instead of Opera being the first alternative browser on the platform, you choose to define "alternative browser" in such a way that the platform already has a plethora of "alternative browsers", turning freedom of choice into a game of semantics. What's your point, apart from clouding the issue?
Someone from Apple is getting fired for mistaking an internal April fools joke in Apple, and actually approving opera.
oh oh... After using it for 20 minutes and LOVING it, first problems arose:
1.- I only got "Internal server error" pages during 30 minutes. Maybe Opera's servers where saturated?
2.- When it worked again, I couldn't post it in my Facebook!! As Opera servers are in Norway (I'm in Spain), an alert appeared when connecting to FB: "Your account is blocked, somebody tried to hijack your account from another country".
but when it works... it's simply the best
Actually I believe it will be Opera Maxi for the iPad.
I just tried it and it's pretty clear why Apple approved it. Opera Mini is so vastly inferior to the built in safari that all of the non-slashdotites who try it will instantly lose any desire they had for alternative browsers.
Even the nytimes site that is in the default bookmarks is unreadable, and when you try to two-finger zoom in it moves you to some pre-set zoom level that's too far in.
Except that's Apple's fault, not Adobe's.
Basically, Apple doesn't provide the APIs required to allow Flash to take advantage of any hardware acceleration features. The Diablo III page embeds a small Flash movie to make the white things float around. Under Windows, that video is hardware accelerated. Since Apple forbids Adobe from doing that under Mac OS X, it's all decoded in software.
That's why it's so slow under Mac OS X: Apple doesn't allow it to be faster than QuickTime.
Is IPv6 support still missing?
I can't wait for the day when the *full* user experience of Internet Explorer finally comes to the iPhone :p
It's not a browser, it's a glorified picture viewer. Opera Mini displays a picture of the site with some knowledge of what bits of the picture are links so the user can click on them. A proper browser would be something like Opera Mobile which executes Javascript, HTML, plugins and anything else it wants to locally on the device.
No, they had a monopoly on operating systems, which is what the suit was about (and, before you reply - monopoly in antitrust cases is the practical definition, not the theoretical "only one supplier" which rarely happens in the real world; Apple is not remotely close to either in the mobile phone market).
My father grew up experiencing the highly-controlled economy of the 1950s and 1960s Soviet Union. I just showed him this Slashdot submission, and he said the headline reminded him of those he would occasionally see in the local newspaper of the town he grew up in.
Whenever the government allowed somebody to get a vehicle (apparently a big deal in small towns in those days), there would be headlines like, "<person's name> has been approved for a <vehicle's name>."
The similarities shouldn't be surprising, I suppose. Apple basically does want to create a centrally-controlled economy around their platform, with them making all decisions for everyone using their platform.
I thought the new Apple agreement says that the program must originally be written against Apple's API and not go through any compatibility layers.
If Opera runs on 10+ platforms, what are the chances that it doesn't contain any compatibility layers?
So someone who uses Chrome over Safari on Windows or OS X is not making a choice, it's merely semantics?
The web browser is more than just the rendering engine.
My point was that it is a commonly held belief (based on the last article about browsers on the iPhone) that there were *no alternatives at all* on the iPhone, and that this article seems to be going the same way.
You have a variable standard of duty to know what the heck you are talking about. In this case, the duty is very small, amounting to only the importance of making a post on Slashdot. Nevertheless, in this case spending two seconds searching something like "opera iphone rejected" will turn up plenty of results. You failed even the tiny duty requisite for making a post -- and that's why we are mocking you. At the end of the day, getting mocked on Slashdot is small punishment for making a boneheaded post.
Saying "Safari" is reasonable synecdoche for "WebKit". Thus, saying there are "No other browsers than Safari" is a reasonable statement. There are fifty versions of Safari available, and none of any other browsers.
* I don't have an iPhone, and I've never seen the App Store, and I don't know what is available there; my point is only about the rhetorical overlap between "Safari" and "WebKit". Please don't read too much into what I said.
I take the point - but for antitrust issues to apply, Apple would have to have a monopoly on phones
No, European antitrust legislation applies to any "activity that aims to prevent, restrict or distort competition". It is not necessary for a company to be in a monopoly position for those conditions to be true.
Equally, it could also be argued that Apple has a monopoly on iPhone app stores, in order to show that they could exert undue control over what should be a freely competitive market.
It's not a huge leap to conclude that if Apple exploits their position as owner of the iPhone OS and app store to disadvantage their competitors who want to release iPhone apps, then those competitors are going to cry foul.
Did you consider that one of the reasons the Opera browser may have being accepted is because of the attention that Opera brought to the subject? It is certainly possible that Apple's decision to allow the app would have been affected by the fact that Opera is a European company involved in a high-profile ongoing EU antitrust case regarding web browsers. Rejecting the app would probably have triggered an antitrust complaint from Opera, and that is the kind of attention that Apple could do without.
While I'm sure there's a moment of truth in your perspective, you need to see what Opera Mini is. It's, simply put, a free VNC client especially designed for web browsing. There are plenty of VNC clients on the AppStore right now and it's been the case for a long long time. Opera Mini is a web browser on your iPhone about as much as remoting into your WinXP PC from the iPhone is running WinXP on your iPhone.
As you know, Apple doesn't want to lose control of the platform experience and ecosystem, so they forbid apps that can load other apps. That's the big reason why a real non-webkit browser won't be accepted: it's a slippery slope.
If they did allow, browser "X", that browser could start adding iPhone API support for web apps little by little, and before you know it, it has creeped up to a full app platform that bypasses the AppStore completely. Instead, no JavaScript or Flash gets executed on the iPhone with Opera Mini, it's all computed remotely, and as such it can't easily be called an app platform on the phone itself.
So Chrome is just Safari then. Got it.
Where did I say it crashed my browser? It doesn't cause crashes, it's just very heavy on CPU - look at the screen shot. That's a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo iMac, and that page on Windows (while looking the same) doesn't push the CPU nearly as hard.
HD streams on BBC iPlayer drop frames, yet the exact same streams on XBMC running on top of OS X (ie, just start the XBMC app - no rebooting) play with a tenth of the CPU use (but stop after 1 minute since the addition of the swf verification by the BBC on their streams).
This is not a problem with my systems. I have 3 Macs, all with various levels of OS X (one of them PPC) and Flash is dreadful on all of them. Should I reinstall OS X on all three? My family members have another 3 Macs between them with the same issue. Should I reinstall them?
I am not disputing that it works - I have spent a lot of time on Blizzard's Diablo 3 site (looking forward to the game) and it's not full of crashes or impossibly slow animations or video, but it pushes my CPU up near the limit to do this. There's no way that the site would run on flash on the iPhone with a 600Mhz ARM cpu.
So, while flash is just about good enough for OS X (ie, they brute force it), it just won't work for the iPhone.
Tell me, should an SD stream also stutter - as this one did, and push the CPU as shown in the screenshot. I rebooted just to be sure. Bear in mind this isn't even the HD stream (that XBMC used to play perfectly at very low cpu load before the added the flash verification check), which is even worse in the browser plugin.
http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/2258/osxflashiplayerapr10.jpg
I took that a few minutes ago, on a fresh reboot of OS X 10.6.3, iMac Core 2 Duo 2.16Ghz, 2GB RAM, Safari 4.0.4.
There is no excuse for the performance to be that poor. If you set the stream to play fullscreen, you can at least get the SD stuff to play with no stuttering (and there is a visible drop is CPU use while playing fullscreen, so I assume there is some scaling thing going on or something, or some other processing that badly affects it).
I don't get any crashing though (and never said I did). It's not unique to my install of OS X either, and is common across all versions of OS X I have used, on many different Macs.
The video playing is not the only thing that pushes it though, as shown by my Diablo 3 flash website shot shown earlier.
It's just poor.
And why on Earth would anyone devote hundreds of hours of their time (and money) to developing a product that, according to the developer ToS, would never, ever be approved?
For those of us on limited Data plans Opera Mini's server side compression is great, not to mention the increased speed. Mind you on my Non-Apple smart phone I have recently started using Bolt browser - it has similar server side compression but gives a more "desktop like" web page appearance.
After almost a month!
Chrome uses a different javascript interpreter in addition to a different UI, and has some interesting security features as well. The other browsers are more akin to the IE frontends on Windows back when Netscape 4.7 was the only functional alternative to IE.
And if your point was that "it is a commonly held belief that there were *no alternatives at all* on the iPhone", why did you then make it by replying to someone making the ludicrous statement that Opera in the App store is a victory for the free market that the choice was already there? Especially when it clearly wasn't, as you've already admitted. I'm just saying: if that was your point, then you didn't make it.
To be less facetious, Ubuntu is Linux, right.
So anywhere Linux is mentioned, I can just say Ubuntu...
Clearly not - just because people do confuse it and start to come up with synonymous terms doesn't make it accurate, especially when specific technical issues are raised.
Perhaps you didn't read through the end of my comment. Here, I'll quote myself for you: I don't have an iPhone, and I've never seen the App Store, and I don't know what is available there; my point is only about the rhetorical overlap between "Safari" and "WebKit". Please don't read too much into what I said.
Toodles!
Yeah, that's one weakness of synecdoche and human language. Programmers like you and I find solace from the vagaries of human expression in the tidy perfection of context-free computer grammars. Alas, sometimes we must put away our computing machines and try to communicate with one another. Good luck.
I'm
just
happy
to
have
a
browser
that
renders
Slashdot
comments
properly.
The very root post of this discussion calls this a victory for the free market now that the tyranny of the app store has been broken - how is that *not* a clear inference that now there is a competitor to Safari, the app store tyranny is broken?
The UI is just as crucial a part of an app as the back end - as you mentioned with Chrome (leaving aside the JM for a second), even with the same engine, their appearance and mechanics above Webkit are quite different.
A lot of the browsers available are mere front ends to Webkit in the way that ISP-bundled browsers were on top of Trident back in the day, but several are not and offer differences to Safari that are otherwise not there.
Someone pointed out to me in another post that it's not the alternative engine per se that is against the rules, it's specifically the Javascript interpreter, so presumably someone could write a browser that used Gecko or Presto or something else but use the built in JM that Safari uses (assuming it's not a private framework - it's not in desktop OS X)
You sir, fail to understand antitrust.
Antitrust in when a company uses a monopoly to unfairly obtain a larger share in another market. Monopolies are *not* prohibited, abusing them is.
In the MS vs. Netscape, Microsoft was using their monopoly in the OS market to unfairly squash Netscape in the browsers war (because they used their OS installed base to distribute IE, something Netscape couldn't do, because Microsoft had a monopoly in the OSs).
Dilbert RSS feed
Blah blah blah. You disregard the obvious fact that in the so-called free market, people are allowed to sell products and services as well as buy them, and the way you're downplaying the equally obivous fact that Opera is the only browser on the iPhone so far that doesn't come with WebKit reminds me of something completely different.
Are you listening?
There is no version of Chrome available for the iPhone, so your snarky remark seems misplaced.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
the Apple approval also cc'd the Anti-Trust division of the Justice Department, as that is the only reason Apple allowed this.
I've got Opera Mini on my BlackBerry. I've "used" it quite a few times and it's never been less than frustrating. Mobile Safari is light years ahead.
Yes, and in this free market, Apple is allowed to do what it likes in its own store. It works both ways.
So, freedom of choice for everyone except Apple... who aren't allowed to set the rules of their own store.
I made the point in another thread that I think it would have been more accurate to state that it was the first browser on the iPhone to use something other than Webkit - I didn't mean to downplay that part.
By that point in the thread we were talking about the synonymous nature of technical terms, and that Safari was a synonym for Webkit, even though technically it is not in the same way that Ubuntu is not a synonym for Linux.
It was more about being precise about meaning than anything else. I was less facetious in my second reply to the same poster.
The first thing I notice is you can't zoom to any arbitrary amount, it just jumps in and out to what it thinks it should, which isn't always right. However, I definitely like the "long click" (click and hold) to get the option to open in a new tab, although I wish they'd make them open in the background. Oh well. In any case, I really hope they make this for iPad. (Or Safari adds this feature.)
In other news, I'm really curious what's in this for Opera--not only are they developing a browser and giving it away, they've got to run the servers that process the content that feeds the browser. Why?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Funny how all the sycophants who whine about freedom and Apple's "control freak" nature are noticeably absent on this story.
Am I missing the point somehow? I've installed the browser and attempted to go to two sites: http://www.smh.com.au/ and http://slashdot.org/
Neither of those worked as I expected... it gave me the non-mobile version of the website which is _useless_ on a screen the size of iPhone's.
I don't see the point of this browser. Perhaps it's only suitable for iPad...
Please don't send a Word document when a text file will do the job.
actually, you should use the much more powerful/better browser opera mobile on symbian and win mobile. they are true browsers which can even replace the inbuilt browser as default.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
I don't know much about Opera mini but the best alternative browser for iPod/iPhone is iCab. Check it out.
Extreme love of Jailbreakers?
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.