I guess even Apple has to trim their sails to the prevailing wind every now and again. Andrew Orlowski reviews the new iPhone implementation of Opera:
At last. Apple approved Opera’s Mini browser for the iPhone overnight, and in in a few hours it’s already attracted over 150 reviews. They’re not all positive, and not all accurate, but it’s an indication of how much interest there is in a better browser. While Safari was the jewel in the crown of the iPhone user interface, it hasn’t changed in three years. There are now 80 million iPhone and iPod Touches out in the wild, so some choice is long overdue.
What’s it like, then?
They said it was impossible . . .
Mini is fast, and Opera has sprung no surprises in the look and feel department. The font rendering and touch navigation — the mechanics of scrolling and zooming – aren’t quite as slick as we get with Safari, but they’re not far off. Mini also boasts also some very nice user-friendly features absent in Safari, such as saving web pages, searching inside a page, custom searches, and bookmark sync. And so it should . . .
Performance is the big draw, here. It’s always been the Mini’s signature feature: it was designed around speed and overcoming the obstacles to a good user experience on a mobile. Unlike the native version of Opera, Mini is really a lightweight document viewer, with the web page rendered on a proxy server, compressed, and sent down to the phone as a compact binary stream. The page is sent in large chunks, because TCP/IP’s chatty, bitty nature exacerbates the latencies that are a feature of 3G networks.
I’ll be downloading a copy as soon as I post this blog entry . . .
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Pingback by Tweets that mention Surprise! Apple allows competing browser onto the iPhone « Quotulatiousness -- Topsy.com — April 13, 2010 @ 07:47
The question is: does it Flash?
I find this bit interesting:
If that’s what it’s doing behind the scenes, then how about transmogrifying Flash objects on a webpage on the fly into something that the iPhone / iPod / iPad can digest and run? Apple’s argument is that Flash blows goats and is unreliable — could something like what Opera is doing here convert Flash into something more contained and less likely to bugger up Apple’s OS?
I suspect that Apple’s anti-Flash license clause would forbid this sort of thing, but it would be interesting to see if it could work.
Comment by Lickmuffin — April 13, 2010 @ 11:08
I’m fairly certain that it would be technically feasible to do as you suggest. I’m also fairly certain that it would be a violation of Apple’s developer licensing agreement. Apple has several reasons for their anti-Flash stance, only a few of which have purely technical merit.
Full disclosure: I’m an iPhone user (and still really happy with the device), but I do think Apple is making a big long-term mistake in its restrictive and paranoid dealings with independent software developers.
Comment by Nicholas — April 13, 2010 @ 11:17