At the time of this writing, it’s been just over two hours, 21 minutes and 14 seconds since Opera submitted Opera Mini to Apple for inclusion in the iTunes App Store.
How do we know this? Opera is putting Apple’s notoriously slow response time and browser monopoly on center stage today as part of its announcement that it is coming to the iPhone.
Opera first announced that it was planning to bring its mobile browser to the iPhone at the beginning of February. As we noted then, Apple’s response is uncertain, as it has yet to allow any browsers that use alternative rendering engines on the iPhone. While other apps work on top of Safari, there are no other independent browsers.
Opera Mini is already available for Symbian and Android and Mozilla has been working on apps for Android and Windows Mobile.
A primary difference between Opera and Safari is the browser’s server-side rendering, which downloads a web page to a server and compresses it before sending it to the client, in this case your phone, for viewing. This method can reduce page load-times dramatically and could be even more important for mobile browsing than it is for web viewing at home.
The following sneak-peek video shows a full-featured, tabbed browser that certainly looks a lot faster than Apple’s native Safari.
Even if we end up trying Opera Mini and decide to stick with Safari, in the end we feel it’s always better to have options when it comes to software and platforms. But then again, that’s not exactly what Apple is known for, is it?
Hopefully, Opera Mini will pass muster and it will be the beginning of the browser revolution for the iPhone – or, at very least, we’ll have two browsers to choose from.
Don’t miss the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7th in Mountain View, California! We’re at a key point in the history of mobile computing right now – we hope you’ll join us, and a group of the most innovative leaders in the mobile industry, to discuss it.
