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Opera Slows Its Development On The iOS Platform (betanews.com)
Reader BrianFagioli writes: After searching for Opera in the Apple App Store, I noticed something odd -- none of the company's iOS browsers (Opera Mini and Opera Coast) had been updated in 2017. Since we are almost halfway through the year, I decided to ask Opera what was up. Shockingly, the company told me that it no longer has a team working on iOS. An Opera employee by the name of 'Rosi' sent me a tweet this morning, making the revelation. While the desktop version of the browser is still in development, the company has chosen to abandon its efforts on iOS. To show just how bad it is, the Opera Mini browser hasn't been updated in almost a year. Opera Coast was updated in December of 2016, however -- almost six months ago.
Update: Opera has clarified that while they're not currently working on iOS, they still plan to support it.
Update: Opera has clarified that while they're not currently working on iOS, they still plan to support it.
see subject
Ever since it gave up presto it is nothing but a spyware chrome clone. If it it wants to be of anything useful it should take the Firefox source code and keep a XUL extension system running instead of web extensions. Otherwise Opera has no reason to exist.
I haven't figured out how it's bad yet, but I'm sure I will. Just give me a minute.
Given that all browsers on iOS are required to use WebKit, and Opera's investment in Presto and fallout for supporting Blink, I can see why Opera would cut their losses and cease development on what is ultimately only a skin for iOS functionality.
Also, I expect that the additional complexity of offering an app-specific VPN to iOS users factored in to the decision.
So-called "browsers" on iOS are just skins. Why would anyone think Opera's skin is relevant?
Funny I was just thinking of this yesterday -- extremism is a problem, oppression is a cause
The only thing third party developers are allowed to do is reskin Safari, so it shouldn't be a surprise if the entities who make good, even better, browsers on other platforms just drop out.
The web browsers on iOS like Firefox and Chrome are actually using the WebKit rendering engine. Chrome brings the material design look and feel and both of them let you just keep the bookmarks and whatever other niceties but the actual renderer is no different than Safari on iOS.
Opera, however, was different - they would render the page server-side as an image and then send that image to your phone. This let them ship a browser on iOS as well as get around Apple's no-rendering-engines rule.
But you can see the issue with this, right? Is Opera caching the images on their servers? Probably not but you can't know. For all you know, JPEGs of your bank website are on their servers. SSL doesn't matter as much anymore because the rendering isn't being done on your device.
So this is different than if they were abandoning an iOS web browser that was a WebKit wrapper like the others, this is Opera saying they no longer want to deal with this render-on-the-server mess.
To say nothing about the fact that Opera as a company has to be struggling right now, they've got less desktop market share than Edge, which no one uses on purpose. They have less market share than Safari which is only on the Mac. I think their switch from Presto to Blink was less that they agreed with Google's standards and more that they just couldn't afford to keep developing Presto anymore. It must be so weird to work for a company that makes a product so few people use.
Schnapple
For me the very best everyday browser on my iphone was coast. so it's too bad.
they did do mre than skin it by the way. They also compressed websites for faster transmission.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
One of my gripes with iOS web browsing is the page reload when you context-switch back to it, which is a dreadful experience on an airplane via GoGo. I'd been looking into writing a browser better at caching, but the Apple requirements are that the browser use their WebKit. So you can't really change the behavior. Apple also restricts scripting, doesn't support a wide variety of languages, can't support TUN VPNs... but the corporate types like it for how bolted-down and controllable it is.
I would say that it is USA that is causing most of the security problems in the world these days. If by your logic you want to extend that to mean christianity since USA is a christian country, go ahead.
Or maybe Opera couldn't switch their tool chain over to exclusively 64-bit iOS apps? Apple is planning to drop 32-bit apps from the app store. A friend who tests iOS apps told me that this is a big problem for some 32-bit app developers.
https://9to5mac.com/2017/04/09/32-bit-apps-ios/
Since iOS 8, Apple recommends everybody uses the new WKWebView which replaces UIWebView: https://developer.apple.com/re...
However, WKWebView is not as flexible as UIWebView; more specifically, there is no support for a custom NSURLProtocol. Basically to get the performance gains of using WKWebView, you can't do the things you want to do.
For Opera specifically, this bug filed against webkit lays out the features they would like to implement, but are unable to: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_b...
Opera on iOS implements a custom HTTP(S) protocol to do:
1. Data savings (see http://www.opera.com/turbo ). This greatly improves connectivity under crappy network conditions for millions of users. It's especially important for people in countries which can only dream about 4G.
2. Peer-to-peer inobtrusive security. For that we collect bits of site security information that is only available via low-level network APIs.
3. Presenting sites as icons (and grouping multiple pages into the same icons). For that we hook into the HTML data stream to parse meta data ASAP. In addition we intercept and react on HTTP redirects. This is a part of the http://operacoast.com/ app identity.
4. Progress loading reporting, automatic retries on bad networks. For that we do traffic QoS monitoring.
5. Fast going back and offline content. That is controlled partially by a custom cache, and partially in NSURLProtocol.
6. Ad-blocking.
They are still doing that, I think.
in other words, who cares? Opera was never going to do well on any platform. iOS is no different and the server side bullshit was a non-starter to begin with. Ill take Apple or Google's security over that any day. Besides who wants a Chinese browser anyways? Other than harvesting user data and selling it to advertisers I'm not so sure why other companies keep clamoring into the browser race. Either offer a major compelling feature or find something else to develop. Safari is a fast and able browser, so is Chrome. Firefox is all but dead on mobile as well so seriously why are developers trying to move into a territory where they will own 1% market share regardless of feature sets?
Yeah. Those pesky religious nuts that murdered 45 million people in China and 23 million in Russia and 1.7 million in Cambodia. Yup. Religion is definitely the problem.
some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.
All major operating systems ship with a browser that isn't Opera and you have both Chrome and Firefox available as free options. I don't understand why anyone would use Opera. Is it the people who desperately need to feel different? I.e. the ones who drive Saab and go canoeing on weekends - and I don't mean the normal way, but rather standing in the back, sticking the paddle up their rear and moving forward by wiggling from side to side.
It's about time someone came up with an turnkey-solution front-end/back-end version of Firefox and Chrome.
The front end would work on iOS or for that matter any other operating system and the back end - which would do the rendering and provide the any UI elements prohibited by Apple's rules - would work on the "back end." The back end would work on my PC/macOS/Linux machine or more likely a cloud-virtual machine.
You say Apple wouldn't allow this? Oh, but they already do: Every remote-desktop/VNC/etc. tool does exactly this, and of course much more. A skilled person could probably set up a "on login as user FOO, run firefox in a jail/chroot/sandbox environment" on his server and use existing remote-desktop software to do this today. What's missing is the "turnkey" version that's "plug and go" on both the front-end and back-end side of things - something so easy that most users could get it up and running in less than 10 minutes, assuming they had a public-facing back-end machine or a way to tunnel into a behind-the-firewall back-end machine (which probably is NOT the case for 90% of users, but that's not an iOS issue).
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Seriously, this is a slow-motion replay of why Jobs had to save Apple in 1997. A whole bunch of stupid, disjointed moves without any governing will making it all make sense.
No matter who you are, if you're on IOS, you're a wapper around Safari's Webkit implementation (even Firefox). Very difficult to do otherwise. it's just not an open platform.
I didn't read most of your screed but I can foresee a few problems with this bit.
Write "Who killed Seth Rich" and / or "Who is Seth Rich" neatly on every piece of U.S. currency you get your hands on, neatly, in indelible ink, preferably with a fine point sharpie that does not draw thick.
The kind of people who would think it's a good idea to do this are also, not coincidentally, the kind of people who have trouble getting their hands on pieces of US currency and even if they did, would be stumped by the instructions "write" and "neatly".
The market share of iOS is below 20% worldwide anyway. On;y in the US it is still comparable with Android, but in all other markets it is nearly dropping to the level of irrelevant.
I was hoping for a comment (done), not a zero.