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Opera Mini Approved for Inclusion in App Store
- Thread starter chowmein
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drats.. was going to reattempt my guess sometime today or tomorrow. The countdown competition was fun.. was planning on getting the phone and reselling it.. lol
Pretty fast browsing
Pretty fast browsing
Excuse my language but this app seems really half-assed. With all the hype and the "counter" that was put on opera's site trying to get this approved, it's terrible. They had so much time on their hands and this is what they brought to the table? A browser with only 1 viewable mode? One is zoomed really far out where everything is scribbled and the other zooms too far in. The scrolling is not smooth and at all and is sensitive compared to safari. Granted it's a little bit faster but it's not worth it to use over Safari. Good try opera...good try...
Okay, sorry but that's just stupid, Opera mini is a LONG way from unusable. It's extremely quick, allows you to preserve tabs when you navigate away and for a great many sites will render either correctly or close enough. Does it have problems? Yes, no question, but I can certainly understand why you wouldn't necessarily polish it to perfection without knowing if Apple would approve it or not. Zooming isn't as slick as Safari but it works well enough and the inconveniences (and that's what most of your complaints are) are balanced out by the advantages.
Fact is there are some things Opera does better than Safari. There are some things Safari does better than Opera. The ideal mix of the two does not yet exist therefore the best idea is to keep both applications on your device. Use your preferred browser day-to-day but have the other available for those situations when it's necessary.
Look guys, here's how it works. Apple has something like a million servers* running the iTunes store. Once they approve an app, it typically takes a few hours for it to replicate across all the servers. Some of you may be able to see it already if you're lucky enough to hit a server that's been replicated already, some of you may not. So you're all right... Just calm down, it'll be there tomorrow for sure.
* Well, not really. But a LOT.
I like it, it's fast. I also roam a lot so being able to navigate quickly and use less data is important to me. Well done Opera.
I'm enjoying it. Using it right now, as a matter of fact. Tabbing and the speed dial page are nice inclusions. Page rendering is very fast, and while there are a number of things that could be improved upon, this is a huge step in the right direction for alternative browsers.
Still waiting for my Chrome app, though. I won't hold my breath.
Still waiting for my Chrome app, though. I won't hold my breath.
Here are my observations so far from 15 minutes worth of use...
Pros:
Its fast
Unlimited tabs? (seemingly)
Tabs don't reload when you quit, they even stay in Airplane mode
Nice bookmarking
Customizable settings (like full screen mode) are neat, along with image quality
Pressing back / forward buttons results in nearly instantaneous navigation - cached?
Cons:
Zooming sucks - only two levels, can only be zoomed in on landscape? Sometimes zoom gets stuck in portrait
Comes with titlebar by default - option to make fullscreen - just want option to get rid of title bar
Text selection is inferior
Have to double tap on items in history drop down
Feels "loose" compared to Safari - hard to describe
Tab browsing is difficult with too many open
Bottom line:
If Opera can get their zooming and scrolling under control, this thing might make it to my first page on my home screen.
Until then, the only way it will get there is my utilities folder come summer! I can only see myself using this when the internet is especially slow--like out in the country or at the AT&T black hole that is my mother-in-law's house. This browser is very fast, and fairly customizable with lots of tabs and it stores them before quitting. I believe this app has a lot of potential, and quite frankly would like to see Apple implement some of these features in Safari (ESPECIALLY SAVING TABS ON IPAD WITH ITS 256MB RAM!!) Though I can always hope for 4.0 and saving states for fast app switching. Seems to be the same basic idea as this, though this optimizes things a bit resulting in a smaller page size.
It is good to see Apple approve something like this, and hopefully other developers like Mozilla can now find a way to produce a similar app that "beats the executable code system" by rendering outside the app. This opens the door to further possibilities, if implemented properly. Kudos to Opera for innovating a way around. This goes to show that Apple only locked down browsers in the app store for security purposes. Hopefully they will eventually be able to completely sandbox entire apps from the OS so we can get native Firefox! Imagine the multitouch plugin goodness.
Edit: What the hell is with this intrusive ad banner that just flew across my page and covered up the center of it? I'm writing this from FireFox on a Mac. Is MacRumors finally implementing all the corny, invasive ads seen on equally corny sites? I thought this place was classy. Maybe it was just a glitch, but I hated that survey popup.
Pros:
Its fast
Unlimited tabs? (seemingly)
Tabs don't reload when you quit, they even stay in Airplane mode
Nice bookmarking
Customizable settings (like full screen mode) are neat, along with image quality
Pressing back / forward buttons results in nearly instantaneous navigation - cached?
Cons:
Zooming sucks - only two levels, can only be zoomed in on landscape? Sometimes zoom gets stuck in portrait
Comes with titlebar by default - option to make fullscreen - just want option to get rid of title bar
Text selection is inferior
Have to double tap on items in history drop down
Feels "loose" compared to Safari - hard to describe
Tab browsing is difficult with too many open
Bottom line:
If Opera can get their zooming and scrolling under control, this thing might make it to my first page on my home screen.
Until then, the only way it will get there is my utilities folder come summer! I can only see myself using this when the internet is especially slow--like out in the country or at the AT&T black hole that is my mother-in-law's house. This browser is very fast, and fairly customizable with lots of tabs and it stores them before quitting. I believe this app has a lot of potential, and quite frankly would like to see Apple implement some of these features in Safari (ESPECIALLY SAVING TABS ON IPAD WITH ITS 256MB RAM!!) Though I can always hope for 4.0 and saving states for fast app switching. Seems to be the same basic idea as this, though this optimizes things a bit resulting in a smaller page size.
It is good to see Apple approve something like this, and hopefully other developers like Mozilla can now find a way to produce a similar app that "beats the executable code system" by rendering outside the app. This opens the door to further possibilities, if implemented properly. Kudos to Opera for innovating a way around. This goes to show that Apple only locked down browsers in the app store for security purposes. Hopefully they will eventually be able to completely sandbox entire apps from the OS so we can get native Firefox! Imagine the multitouch plugin goodness.
Edit: What the hell is with this intrusive ad banner that just flew across my page and covered up the center of it? I'm writing this from FireFox on a Mac. Is MacRumors finally implementing all the corny, invasive ads seen on equally corny sites? I thought this place was classy. Maybe it was just a glitch, but I hated that survey popup.
It's fast as all hell, but it really is a step back in terms of overall browsing.
Mobile safari is very much a REAL browser. Full HTML5 support (well almost full) and underpinnings that make all code compilation analogous to a desktop.
Opera mini is lacking in almost all actual web features, but it surfs the web super fast.
Pick your poison I suppose.
Mobile safari is very much a REAL browser. Full HTML5 support (well almost full) and underpinnings that make all code compilation analogous to a desktop.
Opera mini is lacking in almost all actual web features, but it surfs the web super fast.
Pick your poison I suppose.
Just downloaded it, it's really damn fast, however, it doesn't synch bookmarks, it doesn't render text the right size and it doesn't allow you to zoom like in Safari, you can either be "zoomed in" or "zoomed out" but nothing in between. The interface is also a bit complicated and there are buttons that don't do anything. I like the way you can easily and quickly change tabs unlike in Safari where it brings you up this slow and full-screen page to switch tabs. It's a good start but there is no way I'm going to use this to browse the web, I'm not going to start typing in my dozens of bookmarks one by one by URL, and pages have to render properly. The speed is impressive though!
Good on Apple to approve this, the haters were just waiting and hoping Apple would reject the browser so they would have something else to attack. It's nice to have some alternatives, but I'm very disappointed in all the rendering errors to this browser is showing in certain websites. Hopefully they fix that immediately, I'll be damned if I write hacks for Opera Mini.
I KNOW!!! what the???? Never experienced annoying ads on this site till now :-(. I had flad enabled on fire fox so hopeful I can block it.
My thoughts exactly. This is no competition at all to Safari. Rendering, zoom (are they serious?!) and conformance to iPhone OS interface elements behaviour, look and feeling - they got it all wrong.
Deleted.
I agree with this, been on 10 sited this morning from bbc, macrumours to IGN and newsnow and all of them have had problems links not responding or pages taking ages to load.
What was the point in releasing this if it was going to be worse than the browser already on the phone.
It will take alot to shift safari as my NO1 browser for iPhone.
Wish apple would have rejected it now would have saved me he dissapointment of installing this.
Hopefully they will update it with a few fixes now they know it's been ok'd but im not holding my breath.
At least it has a "find in page" function. Would it kill apple to implement this so i dont have to use the bookmarks hack.
is it suppose to do this?
i've just isntalled the app, and opened it. it just sits there with a white page, red banner on top with the text "opera mini" with a timer...
is it supposed to do this?
i've just isntalled the app, and opened it. it just sits there with a white page, red banner on top with the text "opera mini" with a timer...
is it supposed to do this?
I just tried it as well, and I really don't like it. The "either unreadable or zoomed in a fixed amount" is terrible.
Also, for some reason, they're not using the standard iPhone scrolling. When scrolling you normally have more "physics" - usually slides longer with the same amount of force and bounces off the edge and such. Hard to explain and really a minor thing, but when you're used to that kind of scrolling in every other iPhone app, the scrolling they used here just seems wrong. This is also why I don't like Andriod based phones, the scrolling usually feels "square" and choppy
The browser itself looks ok with settings / different tabs and such, but seems to render pages worse than Safari. Too bad, had high hopes for this browser but I'll stick with Safari.
Also, for some reason, they're not using the standard iPhone scrolling. When scrolling you normally have more "physics" - usually slides longer with the same amount of force and bounces off the edge and such. Hard to explain and really a minor thing, but when you're used to that kind of scrolling in every other iPhone app, the scrolling they used here just seems wrong. This is also why I don't like Andriod based phones, the scrolling usually feels "square" and choppy
The browser itself looks ok with settings / different tabs and such, but seems to render pages worse than Safari. Too bad, had high hopes for this browser but I'll stick with Safari.
