A few days ago Apple [AAPL] surprisingly approved the Opera Mini web browser for the iPhone. Opera have designed their browser to be faster than Safari with claims from the company saying it can potentially beat it speed wise by up to 5x.
Of course 5x is quite a bold statement to work, however after testing my self, seeing a video online and seeing some test results compiled by LifeHacker it seems like this is almost the case in some instances which is quite impressive.
Opera Mini achieves fast page loads on the iPhone due to caching pages and compressing pages and images severside before the iPhone receives the information. By doing all the hardwork on a powerful server(s) before it gets to the iPhone, it simply lets the iPhone download the pages requested and due to them being compressed it also means less data to transfer to your phone.
Test results for page load speed can be seen in the image below that shows Opera Mini is a lot faster. The only real downsides with Opera Mini is that the application it’s self is less polished than Safari in that zoom features are a little rough and sometimes don’t work as you’d expect. Also the fonts and when zooming out doesn’t look as good either. However, when it comes to page load speeds, Opera leads the way completely.
One thing to note is that this is the first public version of Opera Mini for iPhone that has been made available. Hopefully in future updates we’ll see far better zooming and smoother fonts.
Via: Life Hacker
Opera mini is better than safari. It’s my default browser