Opera mini on the iphone
iphone opera
After a long wait, it's finally being released into the app store. Opera mini brings many things to the iphone:.
- tabbed browsing
Keep several pages open at the same time and easily switch between them using tabs – just as you would on your desktop computer. On touchscreen devices, visual tabs even allow you to see a preview of the open pages you can select.
- Integration with the desktop
Save, edit and organize bookmarks into folders. Sophisticated bookmark management allows you to keep track of a large number of your favorite sites. Turning on Opera Link even allows you to keep your bookmarks synchronized across Opera on your other connected devices, like your computer, so you always have your links when you need them.
- speed
Opera Mini uses only a tenth of the bandwidth of other browsers, compressing Web pages by up to 90%. On Opera Mobile, turning on Opera Turbo compresses data up to 80% or leave Opera Turbo off to get full Web site data, as you would on a PC.
But the most important thing it brings to the iphone is choice. We can now choose to use either safari and webkit. This in turn will turn up the heat for on one hand the webkit developers, as Opera will be challenging them as they are doing on the desktop. On the other hand, it's a challenge for us lazy web developers who were developing for mobile safari alone. We now have a different browser to deal with.
So the real winners are the users, who now will encounter websites that are being made not only for mobile webkit, but for multiple browsers. Thus making sure the web moves forward...
If you want to see what opera is capable of, see it's Standards support chart. If you're wondering why the rendering is a tad different, look at this.