Opera rolls new Mini onto iPhone and iPad

Opera has released a new version of its Opera Mini browser for the iPhone and the iPad, claiming "faster and smoother" pan and zoom and offering new buttons for sharing links via services such as Twitter and Facebook.

The first major upgrade to the bandwidth-friendly browser since it arrived on the iPhone to much fanfare in April 2010, Opera Mini 6 is now available from the Apple App Store. The company says that on the iPhone 4, the browser now adapts to the handset's higher resolution and interface changes, and that it offers a view specifically designed for the iPad.

Prior to the arrival of Opera Mini, the App Store only offered third-party browsers that used the same WebKit rendering engine as Apple's own Safari browser. The iPhone SDK forbids third-party apps from interpreting their own code, but Opera Mini works around this famous code ban.

Opera Mini taps into Opera 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. Opera claims over 90 per cent compression of traffic. ®