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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.
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.
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
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.
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?