After 20 days, eight hours and 31 minutes, Apple has approved Opera mini to be made available for free on the App Store.
I immediately checked the App Store as soon as I heard the news and surprise, surprise, there it was, Opera Mini Web browser by Opera Software ASA.
So is it the competition worthy of knocking off Safari from my dock?
In short, a big fat no. It is absolutely horrible. It's such a bad app I'm deleting it from my iPhone as soon as I hit send on this post.
Why is it horrible? Not all websites render properly on this browser. On several sites some links would disappear. Or at least it appears that way. They're still there but the text goes missing, leaving blank spaces within paragraphs for example. A refresh fixes this but it happens from time to time.
Text fields in Opera mini do not support autocorrect which has been an important part of typing on iPhone OS.
Typing on restricted text fields like on twitter's mobile site or other third party twitter web apps is unrestricted. You can go all the way past 140 characters and you won't realize it.
Rotating the iPhone would normally zoom or widen a website in Safari but Opera mini does not do that. Instead it maintains the width on portrait mode in landscape and shows a blank column on the remaining space.
How Opera mini displays a website is just plain bad. When you're used to how beautiful Safari renders web pages, you tend to take it for granted. Opera mini makes you really appreciate the hard work Apple and the WebKit team took on making sites look great on the iPhone. All the rendering and processing is done on Opera's servers and you get a seriously compressed version which is why it's really fast.
By fast I mean blazing fast, Opera mini opens sites almost in an instant, it has a neat tabbed browsing interface, it's ideal for those whose net access is limited by speed or quota because it delivers compressed web pages instead of the real thing, and it's fast.
It has an option to display a mobile optimized version of a site, it let's you decide to display reduced or full resolution images, it's really fast, it has a bookmark sync service with your Opera account, it has a speed dial page which has since been copied by Safari and Chrome, and it lets you save pages to open later when you're offline. Oh did I mention it's fast?
By the way, it also doesn't do Flash and is horrible with Acid3 tests, then again it's not really what you would call a traditional browser so you wouldn't really expect it to do well on those tests.
Try it if you will but I wouldn't wish this app on a sick dog.
Sent from my iPhone
