Opera have announced that their Opera Mini browser for the iPhone and iPod Touch has now been approved by Apple [AAPL]. The application is being made available over the next 24 hours depending on where you are. I tested in the UK just now and it was available to download for free.
The application was submitted to Apple on March 23 shortly after Mobile World Congress (where it was first demoed). After many people speculating that it wouldn’t be approved, we actually find now it actually is.
The Opera Mini iPhone browser comes with quite a big claim too with Opera saying it is capable of being up to 6 times faster that the native Safari Browser built in to the iPhone. This is all thanks to using server side compression of HTML and images making sure that the actually downloaded data is kept as small as possible, thus saving download time needed.
The rendering I have to say is super fast when compared to Safari. Loading up various pages across the web seemed to show the browser as being a lot slicker than the native app. The only downside that I have found is that pinch to zoom seems a little flakey at the moment. It works almost as it should, but sometimes when zooming in and out it often looses the pinch and drags the browser across or down screen instead of zooming. Other than that it appears to function as it should.
Hopefully the server side rendering wont be the bottle neck as “millions?” of users download and start using the browser.
Via: TechCrunch
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