As announced last week, Opera demonstrated yesterday in Barcelona an iPhone version of its mobile web browser, Opera Mini, and it’s damn fast.
How fast? Well, about five times faster than your current safari mobile on a 3GS. The trick resides in the way it processes websites.
Safari mobile works exactly like your computer browser, it connects to a website, downloads the page’s code then interprets it. Opera Mini does it differently, when you try to access a page, Opera’s servers will actually load it themselves, interpret it, and just send you the page all ready to see.
This allows to speed up the process very sensibly and let you interact with the page before it finishes loading.
There are however two main issue with the app, first of all, it doesn’t feature multitouch, secondly, well, it’s not available and despite the fact that Opera just announced it will be submitted to Apple, we might never see it get accepted.
[via Engadget]
Firsties!!!
Well the good news is Apple will get to see this, and if they like we may all get a speed upgrade in 4.0, thanks Opera!
Is opera still around? I am still waiting to see what Firefox has up their iPhone sleeve.
No multitouch is a big drawback though, too bad.
Who would want this when any secure sites you visit are decrypted on Opera’s server before being sent out to you. No thanks…
At least Opera is showing Apple how to speed it up. It is annoying how Safari works when I to try to do things on a website before it is done loading. I doubt this gets in the app store. If it does get through by some miracle I will be sure to get it fast before it’s gone.
The Opera servers thing might be a privacy concern. Besides that, it’s not really a good thing if you’re on a fast connection, and anything above 2Mbps is already fast. But hopefully competition will provide improvement incentives.
I am not sure how I feel about this, seems kind of like a step backwards to require server pre-processing.