Opera… It’s Alright
April 15, 2010 by Ryan Ray
I think hell has frozen over, because Opera and their mobile web browser was approved and is now up for download in the App store. Can you believe that? I mean really, it’s a little crazy to think. Doesn’t this go against Apple’s own terms of service? None the less we must all live with reality and say that Safari has some competition headed its way! This is a good thing. I hope this makes way for things like Firefox, IE6… HAH just kidding about that. So check out what Opera Mini looks like.
It’s not a bad interface at all, but definitely a stark change from the grey minimalist Safari we are all used to. The layout is similar. URL bar, search up top. Then at the bottom are navigation arrows refresh, tabs, and settings. So what makes this so special besides being a second browser to Safari? Well the fact is that it’s FAST, no really. It’s REALLY FAST. I believe it pulls of this trick with some behind the scenes server happening at Opera but to the end user what does that matter? Check out the video of Opera v. Safari below.
See what I’m saying? The browser loaded the full site much faster than Safari loaded the mobile version! Honestly that is it’s big feature over Safari. I love Safari and am very familiar with it, Opera isn’t that different but it’s interface is new to me. One other thing that Opera offers is different search options. You can change where you search right from within the search bar. Check out some of the screen shots below.
As you can see in the second shot, those are your search options, pretty cool if you ask me. In the first shot you can see some of the settings for Opera. You can check out bookmarks, history, settings, and more. That’s also a nice little plus outside of Safari. Lastly take a quick look at shot 4. That’s what their tabs look like. You can also check out tabbed browsing in the video above. Another cool implementation of it.
So what is Apple thinking with letting other browsers into the app store? Are they starting to give the people what they want and give Safari some competition? Let’s hope so, competition always wins out for the customer. Hurry up and go grab your download of Opera in the app store. Test it out, and let me know what you think about the first browser outside of Safari on the iPhone. Thanks for reading.
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