Opera Mini Bests Safari On iPhoneOpera Mini Bests Safari On iPhone

Opera Software is demonstrating its Opera Mini browser on Apple's iPhone during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The browser from Opera is better than Apple's native iPhone browser in almost every way, and is much faster.Opera has been making desktop and mobile browsers for years. It has two mobile browsers, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile. The chief difference is that Opera Mobile is a full, on-device browser that does all the work to load Web sites on the handset itself. Opera Mini, on the other hand, uses Opera's proxy and compression services to render Web pages and then deliver them to the handset. Opera's latest creation is a version of Opera Mini for the iPhone.

In tests conducted by me at Opera's booth, Opera Mini beats the pants off iPhone's Safari browser by a wide margin.

Opera was demonstrating how fast Opera Mini works via GPRS networks. In case you've forgotten, GPRS is slower than 2.5G EDGE data. GPRS' heyday was about six or seven years ago. Even over GPRS, Opera Mini was faster than the iPhone's native Safari browser when the iPhone was in 3G mode. It was faster at rendering every site I visited. It loaded the full HTML version of Amazon.com faster than the iPhone loaded the mobile version of Amazon.com. It is fast, Fast, FAST. Speed isn't everything, of course.

Opera Mini offers a lot of interesting features that make mobile browsing better. Like Safari, it supports multiple tabs. Unlike Safari, the tabs can be viewed without forcing the user to leave their current Web page. The tabs appear like a deck of cards below the browser window, and can be shuffled about. Opera said it has not discovered a limit to the number of tabs that can be open at one time.

Opera Mini for iPhone also carries forward its Speed Dial feature, which is a visual bookmarking tool that lets you populate up to nine favorite Web pages for speedier access. Users can sync Opera Mini to their desktop version of Opera, and port over their desktop Speed Dial and other bookmark settings.

Opera Mini does not offer pinch-to-zoom like Safari does (perhaps Opera Mini's one true flaw), but it zooms in and out at light speed when double-tapped. Opera indicated that it can't offer pinch-to-zoom due to SDK limitations enforced by Apple.

Speaking of Apple...

Opera said that it has a few more tweaks to make to Opera Mini for iPhone, but it plans to submit the application to Apple for approval in the next week or so. It will then be up to Apple to approve the application before anyone can use it (legitimately). Opera believes that because Opera Mini behaves differently from Safari in basic architecture, that that's enough of a difference to skirt past Apple's decree that no apps duplicate the iPhone's native apps. Will that reasoning pass the Apple sniff test? We'll find out if/when Apple approves the browser.

If it doesn't, perhaps jailbreakers will be able to install Opera Mini on the iPhones via Cydia.