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.

Comments

Something to note

[Schnapple]

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.