If you’re not satisfied with the performance of iPhone’s Safari browser, Opera may be the alternative. Opera is going to release its Opera Mini browser on iPhone. Earlier, the Opera team has given a demonstration at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress. As reported by Engadget, Opera Mini on iPhone is really fast:
Opera Mini is very, very fast on the iPhone. Loading the New York Times, for example, was about 5x faster than loading the same page in the iPhone 3GS’ stock browser. Pages loaded smoothly and were interactive just as quickly as the content began to load — not unlike the Safari browsing experience.
Folks from Wired also praised the impressive browsing experience of Opera Mini:
“we were very keen to see how it would fare. Our first impression? It’s fast. …… Scrolling through webpages is silky smooth, with nary a glitch or stutter regardless of the size of the page. The interface is instantaneously responsive as well, just as you’d expect from the iPhone. However, those expecting a tightly integrated browsing experience will be disappointed.”
In term of functionality, Opera Mini browser offers similar features as that of Safari. Opera renders the full web page and you can double tap to zoom into a particular part of web page, just like that on Safari. Except, it doesn’t support pinch to zoom.
Without sacrificing any major feature, you may wonder how the developers of Opera can achieve that impressive performance improvement (5 times faster!).
Before we explain how Opera works, let’s first take a look how Safari (or other ordinary browsers) shows you a web page. Say, you are now access New York Times’ website (http://www.nytimes.com). Safari browsers actually sends a request to nytimes.com and download the web page file in the form of HTML, as well as, other components (e.g. images, javascript, style sheet). Once the page is downloaded, Safari browser interprets the web page, renders it and displays it on screen.
Opera Mini takes a different approach to display web page. When Opera sends a request for accessing a web page (say, nytimes.com), that request is actually sent to Opera’s server, which acts as a proxy to contact nytimes.com. The web page is then processed, rendered and compressed by Opera’s backend server before sending back to Opera client on iPhone. As only the rendered result (which is like an image of the actual web page) is sent back to the iPhone, this minimizes the local processing and thus, results in significantly faster web page loading.
As claimed by the Opera team, this approach does not only shorten the page load time. With its renowned compression technology, it also reduces the amount of data sent that the rendered web page is 90% smaller than the original one. That means it’s a big money saver for those not using the unlimited data plan.
The Opera Mini browser is not publicly available yet but the team is planning to submit the app for Apple’s approval. Hopefully, Apple will approve the app and we will soon see its debut on App Store.
Stay tuned. I will keep you posted when Opera Mini is available.
how to download it ?
@ali,
It’s not released yet. But hopefully, it will be available in App Store soon.
Wow!!!! it is fast!!! I like it.