Opera Mini Approved for Inclusion in App Store

[Hyuga]

Hey people, do you have bing as optional search engine or has it been carried over from my desktop opera to iPhone mini through Opera Link?

I had to set it manually to my desktop opera client while ago.

 

[Knowlege Bomb]

Dear God, please let the day come when "fail" is merely an answer to a trivia question in the forgotten fads category.

To be honest, I'd rather have "LOL" fall to the wayside. "Fail" can actually be kind of funny sometimes.

Still not available in the US store. I'm anxious to give it a try although I'm not sure I like the Verizon-esque UI.

 

[Darkroom]

Hardly. most people don't know about Opera and will just go with the preinstalled option.

edit: unless you meant just for you, then sorry.

yes, i meant for me.

i wonder if Adobe could send their 10.1 mobile plugin over to Opera to have it built in to the mini browser. that would be amazing.

 

[Justinf79]

Nice! Getting it now.

Hopefully an iPad version will come soon.

Edit: Nevermind, it appears to be an universal app.

 

[redking31591]

No wonder they allowed it - the UI is POOR.

Sure it's fast, but after using it for my usual browsing sites, it's pretty hard to select the text or images. Their tap and hold method for a 'pop-up' menu is, to put it kindly, extremely inconvenient and unstable. With no magnification-lens for selecting text, it's damn near impossible to highlight what I want.

I do like their search function within the page though. Good start with speed - more improvement needed.

you'd think that with apple, a poor UI would stop them from allowing it

 

[troop231]

yes, i meant for me.

i wonder if Adobe could send their 10.1 mobile plugin over to Opera to have it built in to the mini browser. that would be amazing.

Heh, Apple wouldn't allow that

 

[gwynne]

It's only available in the UK I think which means, it might be released stateside around 11 pm if we are lucky. I wish it was an iPad version but I will download anyway.

Wow, UK gets apps before US? I feel less bad for getting the iPad first now.

(No, I'm not complaining, just find it interesting.)

 

[Rocketman]

This is great news. Set aside Opera and whatever its functionality is, the very fact Apple allows it to shine is telling.

Opera has a meme that not only competes with Safari on some level, but offers a client-server model of page generation and sending as an image.

This is a thing.

There are plenty of other applications that would benefit from this, but one wonders if Opera as a platform hopes to capture most of it by virtue of being "first to market" with a simple mechanism that is approved and deployed.

The other browser.

BTW Steve said at the iPOS 4.0 release event why this is okay. People spend time in apps which will trigger iAds. They do not spend their time in search.

Rocketman

 

[thelatinist]

Why wouldn't Apple approve it? There are lots of alternative browsers in the App Store. As long as Opera was willing to use Webkit instead of its own Presto rendering engine, there's no reason it shouldn't be approved.

 

[friedmud]

All the other browsers are just different SKINS pretty much. It's the same engine though.

We don't really now that opera mini is a different engine. I suspect it still uses webkit... They just feed it a compressed version of the webpage.

Anyone have some hard data on this?

 

[toastr]

oops, I forgot that opera lifted that from them, and then everyone lifted it from them. sorry.

Heh, thats cool. I originally thought Firefox was the first browser to have tabs, but man was I wrong

 

[mcdj]

"Fail" can actually be kind of funny sometimes.

By itself perhaps, but when people type "it's fail" or "that's fail" or "epic fail", it's just a moronic butchering of the language. At least LOL is an acronym.

 

[justinfreid]

woah!

This is good news, choice of browsers on the iPhone is a welcome change; maybe Chrome and Firefox will come next.
If Apple starts to accept or reject apps based purely on technical reasons and not whether or not they challenge Apple's own software, I'd feel much more comfortable with walled garden that is the iPhone.

 

[kirchnrd]

I wish it was an iPad version but I will download anyway.

Same here, love Opera mini on my Blackberry. I am sure an iPad version will come soon.

 

[redking31591]

We don't really now that opera mini is a different engine. I suspect it still uses webkit... They just feed it a compressed version of the webpage.

Anyone have some hard data on this?

Opera said that the pages are rendered server side and then interactive pictures are streamed to the device

 

[rwilliams]

Wow. I thought for sure that this would end up on Cydia. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

 

[mcdj]

so to those outside of the US who have installed it on the iPad, is it iPad sized, or just a blowup of an iPhone version.?

 

[mattmccarty]

If this app follows the current trend of releases, except it to be released at 11pm EST.

 

[troop231]

It would have made more sense to release it globally through the app store at once, so it indeed is fail

 

[celticpride678]

This is good news, choice of browsers on the iPhone is a welcome change; maybe Chrome and Firefox will come next.

Don't think that's gonna happen (ever).

 

[ucfgrad93]

I just really can't see myself using this.

I'm happy for those of you who seem to like it, though.

Agreed, I am quite happy with Safari.

 

[Hands Sandon]

It loads very, very quickly, but that's where the good ends unfortunately. It's very jerky, scrolling is horrible, most pages are formatted into where ads are sometimes huge and the text is in narrow columns, links often won't open at all (including here on MacRumors) and you can't zoom in far enough to make links big enough to click on without hitting say page 4 instead of page 5.

I'm sure it'll improve. It can't not! Thankfully it was free.

I just tried it on O2's non 3G network and it's very fast. It's a lot faster than using 3G in Safari or wifi. I loaded a few pages including the homepage of the Guardian and it only took a few seconds before I could zoom in and read the page. It has it's faults, but I can see me using this whenever I'm not in 3G.

 

[pukifloyd]

This is a great news!

 

[kenypowa]

I have never used it before. Is it better then safari?

Well, if you have a slow network, Opera Mini is a fantastic choice. I also think the tab management is better than Safari's. But then again I am using Opera Mini on Andoird, so I'm not sure if there is any difference between the two versions.

 

[celticpride678]

It's the first release. Why are people complaining so much??

Opera will fix the bugs eventually.