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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."
...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.
how did opera get this through the app store approval process!?
Because, as far as I understand, it is not really a browser, but rather a viewer for a remotely processed webpage: http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/17/opera-mini-on-iphone-is-fast-but-why/
It allowed my old Sony Ericsson phone (can't remember which model, but it was not a smartphone) to have a Safari like zoomable web-browser of quite hight quality (:
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.
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.
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
how many posts from misinformed people, all considering themselves the Holders of the Truth. (and modded interesting, no less)
all other apps using browsers are using the webkit rendered to display pages, which is an iphone component, and while apple doesn't force you to use webkit it does forbid you to use any kind of generic interpreters, including the javascript interpreter required for browser to actually work
opera is the _first_ alternative browser to get published, and it does so not interpreting javascript on the iphone but serving already interpreted web pages (javascript stuff is run on the opera own backend and pages served after collecting the result)
so before posting your smartass "loads of other browser" opinion, please do some research. there are ton of other gullible people that find you "interesting", and now are as misinformed as you, thanks of the slashdot moderation.
For thos of us who have used a Mac, the Flash issue is about performance. Have you ever used Flash on OS X? The result would be much the same on the iPhone (given that the core of iPhone OS is the same as OS X), except now there's no 2GHz+ CPU to make it look acceptable and all you have is a little ARM chip and a battery.
If it was about control then they wouldn't be promoting Flash's replacement for the iPad and iPhone. It really is about performance.
Don't just take my word for it - google "flash performance OSX" for a vast number of complaints about it. It really is hideous. Not just sluggish, but banging a 2Ghz core at 100% usage for website animations and video streams - ie, it drains the battery on your MacBook Pro rather quickly, and is one of the few things that can get the fans on my iMac to become audible.
In fact, I just opened the Diablo 3 page and had it sit idle for about a minute or so and then had a quick look at the CPU use. This is a 2GHz Core2Duo, and whether it is that full-site-flash or a youtube video, or BBC iPlayer stream, the CPU usage looks exactly like this:
http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/4771/flashosxperformance.jpg
Thanks, that's a good point. My favourite mobile browser is Opera Mobile, which I love on my 5800; I guess the Apple phones will never have that.
Even for Opera Mini, it's interesting to note the idea of having to wait for approval, as well as not supporting open standards like Java (again, because of the locked down nature), so they had to presumably rewrite the application for Apple. I was using Opera Mini years ago on my Motorola V980, before the first Iphone was even released.
No, the iPhone's Safari does not have tabs, not in the way desktop Safari does. It's closer to a "virtual desktop" metaphor: you click a button to view a scrollable thumbnail list of open pages.
Personally I think this works better than tabs, given the limited screen size and the sensitivity of the touch.
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
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?
But what Opera Mini does helps greatly anyway as far as "faster, more pleasant browsing" goes; that's one of its selling points.
More pleasant? I don't that word means what you think it means. I loaded up GMail on Opera Mini and I almost threw up. You know, I would expect from a browser company that strives for openness and whatnot to at least include a browser capable of doing javascript properly. Oh and yes, it's faster ... because it doesn't have proper javascript support!
Avoid the waste of time downloading it, Opera Mini is a monkey feces.
Agreed. Flash player on windows doesn't have this problem, but Adobe seems to have actually cared about creating a good windows flash player.
Flash Player on OSX is a resource hog. Adobe just isn't devoting the resources to it to make it work well on OSX. Steve Jobs wasn't kidding when he said that the majority of browser crashes on OSX come from flash. Anytime i've ever experienced safari crashing, it's because of flash.
Now, if the people at Adobe pulled their thumbs out of their asses and got to work on creating a small, lightweight, and resource efficient flash player for OSX, then Steve might reconsider. Until they do, then i'm glad that it's not on my iPhone.
Actually I believe it will be Opera Maxi for the iPad.
From TFA and two links deep, the NY Times posted this clarification.
"So I went back to Mr. von Tetzchner for more details. He said that the development of the iPhone browser was more an "internal project" of some engineers than a product that management was committed to introducing. Indeed, development was halted after the company looked at the details of the license agreement in Apple's software development kit and realized that it would not be permitted.
" 'We stopped the work because of the prohibitive license," Mr. von Tetzchner wrote in an e-mail message.' "
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/03/why-you-will-not-see-opera-on-your-iphone/
The rejection was an assumption. Now you even know more.
You know, I would expect from a browser company that strives for openness and whatnot to at least include a browser capable of doing javascript properly.
They do - it's called Opera Mobile, which isn't on the Iphone. Opera Mini is written to run on all phones, even locked down feature phones. Their Opera Mobile for smart phones has full support.
But if you actually follow the articles, you'll find the following: "The discussion has been raging about how Opera came to know that its software wasn’t going to be welcomed by Apple. In particular, iPhone fans wanted to know if the company submitted a fully working version of Opera to the iPhone App Store. So I went back to Mr. von Tetzchner for more details. He said that the development of the iPhone browser was more an “internal project” of some engineers than a product that management was committed to introducing. Indeed, development was halted after the company looked at the details of the license agreement in Apple’s software development kit and realized that it would not be permitted. “We stopped the work because of the prohibitive license,” Mr. von Tetzchner wrote in an e-mail message. In other words, they read the license and decided that Apple would not allow it without actually talking to Apple.
Though OTOH, when talking about "little ARM chip and a battery", there already is Flash player for that architecture which works surprisingly fine. Apple doesn't want to allow it.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Realize that they made a big sacrifice to make it happen... In order to meet the App Store requirements, there is no local JavasScript execution. It's entirely server-side. While this is nice from a performance perspective (everything is downloaded/processed server-side and then sent over the slow cell network in one compressed chunk), it's severely limiting from a functionality perspective.
Opera Mobile could never make it through the app store with the current terms of service in place; the JS engine makes it ineligible.
I'm
just
happy
to
have
a
browser
that
renders
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