Opera Mini is in the App. Store. It is free and it is pretty dam good.

I am using it to post this form my iPhone.

It seems a lot faster than Safari.

It is dreadful, poor and ruins standards compliant HTML.

Let’s look at a web site I work on.

Functionality Fail:
http://www.softpress.com

In Safrai on an iPhone this works - tapping the tabs under the main image to show. They scroll to show more of an image.

In Opera, this functionality requires a trip to a server, and even then the chances of the right image being displayed is suspect. This code uses the Scriptaculous library, which is pretty robust and cross platform/browser.

http://www.softpress.com/products:
In Safari:


Same page in Opera Mini:


Both show the page “as is” - ie straight after loading the page. In Safari, the page is readable. In Opera, it is illegible, and you have to zoom in to see the text. This site is pretty standards compliant, and uses valid XHTML and CSS. There is no excuse these days to get it so very wrong.

EDIT: First screen shot corrected.

Does the website load a specific stylesheet for Mobile Safari? If so, surely the page needs updating to load that if the user agent string is iPhone Opera as well, as it looks like it's rendering a big-browser version of the site.

No - no special CSS for mobile Safari - it’s not needed. It seems that Opera does a lot more than need a potential second CSS file. It probably needs a different set of ExpressionEngine templates.

Yup, that javascript weirdness is just plain odd! It was just the way the two screenshots looked so different I presumed it must be a different version of the same markup! Crazy Opera! Desktop Opera's normally alright enough!

I'm wondering if this is the reason Apple let it through; they tried it and realised it was arse gravy.

Or maybe that was Opera's plan, and they're going to drip-feed updates to make it usable? It's a conspiracy I tell you! A CONSPIRACY!

Hi - major cock-up here. I uploaded the wrong Safari screen grab. Been taking a few for comparison purposes.

My first post now contains the correct image pairs. The problem is evident - Opera draws the page to an arbitrary width - it doesn’t take landscape mode into account, and at first sight, the page is hard to scan by eye for content when displayed like that. Safari uses the full width of the page so the text is, hopefully, readable even at that size.

I understand that opera Mini talks to an Opera Server which “runs” JavaScript and returns a new version of the page, which is the technical reason why the carousel fails in this way. The bad news is that it’s a trip to the server each and every time you do this. I am not sure how AJAX based sites will fare as they may not actually function properly in tis kind of environment.

Well it does seem pretty nippy.

That’s because it goes through their servers, and the web page gets “optimised”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini#Functionality



So, in all, it’s not a web site you are looking at in Opera, but a kind of mashed-up of a web site.

In a way its like telling opera you want to see a website and they zip it up and send it down to you in compressed format and your iPhone can read the zipped up version.

Should be good for beating the data caps and for speed when not using 3G.

It may not be as nice looking as Safari but I'm sure they'll be a few people who would take the speed over the initial loading look of a website.

Having said that though I haven't used it so it may be shockingly bad to use also.

One thing this WILL bring to the fore is Firefox Mobile. If Opera is allowed on the iPhone, then surely other browsers too? Or is Opera’s methodology so different that it doesn’t qualify in that way?

I heard mention that their system of compressing the pages through their own servers was the loophole they foulnd that allowed them to be put in the appstore.

No doubt the loophole will be patched soon or other browsers will start to adopt the same features.

Surely it'd be dificult for an Open Source product such as FF to get the infrastructure in place for such a system?

<eddit>Maybe we could see iIE though! (8-p)</eddit>

Hmm, copy and paste seems broken on it.