Hands on with Opera’s fast new iPhone web browser

 

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Posted on 13 Apr 2010 at 12:43

The Opera Mini web browser is now available for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad – and it’s significantly faster than Apple’s Safari browser in our tests.

Apple’s Safari mobile web browser is one of the iPhone’s best features, but if you’re stuck on a sluggish 3G, EDGE or GPRS connection then web page loading times can seem like an eternity. In our tests on a first generation iPhone connected to O2’s EDGE data network, Safari loaded the Expert Reviews home page in two minutes and four seconds, although most of the text was readable in one minute. Using Opera Mini, the same page was loaded in 28 seconds – a significant improvement.

Opera Mini achieves its impressive page loading speeds by using a proxy server to render and compress websites before they’re sent to your iPhone. We suspect this is the reason why Apple approved Opera Mini for sale on the iPhone App Store – all other third party web browsers available on the App Store use the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari since Apple forbids the use of third party rendering engines. Opera Mini’s use of a proxy server makes it less suited than Safari for certain uses though, such as accessing encrypted websites containing sensitive data, such as online banking sites, and interactive web applications, such as Google Mail. Logically, Opera Mini would also stop working if Opera’s servers ever went off-line or became overloaded.

Images can be turned off to speed up page loading times even more. There’s more to Opera Mini than just speed though – it has a couple of features we’d love to see in Safari. Pages can be saved so they can be viewed even if you don’t have an internet connection. Pages can be searched for text and the search field can be switched from Google to Amazon, eBay or Wikipedia. The toolbar can be hidden, so even more of the screen is devoted to showing web content.

Opera Mini does have its limitations though. Although it does support the pinch gesture for zooming in and out, it only supports one level of zoom. Scrolling through pages doesn’t feel as smooth as it does in Safari either and pages don't snap back when you scroll to the top or bottom of a page. Text can be copied and pasted, but Opera Mini uses its own copy and paste gestures which don't work as smoothly and accurately as the iPhone OS's standard copy and paste gestures.

We also noticed some odd rendering issues on some websites, especially with blocks for formatted text such as bullet lists. Where available, Safari will often render versions of websites specifically optimised for the iPhone’s small screen. Opera Mini often doesn’t do this, even though it's supposed to when its mobile view option is enabled, which could be either a feature or a bug depending on whether you want the iPhone-specific version of a website or not.

Safari can synchronise its bookmarks with Internet Explorer or Safari on your PC through iTunes, but this synchronisation feature isn’t available to third party browsers. Opera Mini instead uses its own Opera Link feature to synchronise its bookmarks with your computer over the internet, but only if you also use the desktop version of Opera.

Despite its limitations, Opera Mini is well worth downloading if you’re an iPhone user. It’s free, so you have nothing to lose, and it also works with the iPod Touch and iPad.

Author: Alan Lu