Jesus Phone in shock Opera browser benediction
Opera Mini approved for Apple App Store
Apple has allowed the Opera Mini browser on the Jesus Phone, according to a shock announcement from Opera.
With a press release that hit the web very early Norway time on Tuesday, Opera said that its low-bandwidth mobile browser had been approved for the iPhone and iPod touch and that it would be available in the Apple App Store within 24 hours, at least in some markets.
Opera demoed the browser at multiple mobile trade shows earlier this year, and it has always said that it expected approval from Apple. But the smart money was on Jobsian rejection.
Currently, the App Store only offers third-party browsers that use the same WebKit rendering engine as Apple's own Safari browser, and the iPhone SDK forbids applications from interpreting their own code. But because Opera Mini leans on proxy servers for code execution, Opera argued that it does not break the rules of the SDK.
It doesn't. And it would seem that Apple's gatekeepers have actually acknowledged this, making it the first iPhone browser not to use Apple's WebKit rendering engine.
Like existing incarnations of Opera Mini - which were Java-based - the iPhone version taps into proxy servers that intercept and compress webpages before sending them down to the client. This speeds download times - making the browser suitable for slower web connections - but it also means that Mini doesn't interpret code.
"The proxy servers take down web content and transcode it into a compressed and static content format," says chief development officer Christen Krogh has told us. "There is no code execution or any scripting language running on the client." ®
COMMENTS
Great to see, and looking very good
Defiantly alot faster than safari.
The zooming is abit different, but so much quicker, and i think given a few days better
The most promising part is that clearly opera has a andriod, and iphone presence (which no one else 'really' has in this way , and thus I can see them piling on updates aggressively into this.
Oh btw opera is my current favourite PC / Mac browser currently. 10.5 was a massive revolution, esp when you setup your email in it (Wish it had a calendar wignet tho...) Combining Opera sync, means all my bookmarks are up to date on the iphone also
Happy Days
JavaScript
Opera Mini has always done this, it's not something they wrote specifically to please Jobs. It's something they wrote to make their browser work on phones much more limited than the iPhone.
Pot Tential
The best thing about this is the potential for this to turn into an epic holy war between Opera and Apple fanbois.
Wonderful, I sense a schism in the church approaching.
Loving it.
Blisteringly fast (5-10x quicker from what I feel). and works really well.
FREE and opens up choice.
I can see this being my default browser on my iPhone... I love the bookmark sync, so much I'm just tinkering with Opera Desktop (10.51) and it also seems rather swish (and equally as fast).
Talk about JesusPhone, I have just seen the light.... Time to say goodbye to Firefox on my PC and Safari on the phone, Opera allround!!!
Impressed with the speed, needs an update
Second that, it's very quick to load pages but feels very strange and jarring to use. The scrolling in particular needs to be a little bit smoother.
Also, clicking links on the reg homepage is sending me to random stories not the ones I'm clicking on, big problem. I've had to go back to safari to post this!!
I like that you can mange the quick search engines, I always thought it was a shame you can't do this with safari.
