Two new browsers for iPhone: Opera Mini and Skyfire

There are a lot of programs calling themselves “Web browsers” in the App Store, but almost all of them are lying. Rather than being actual browsers, they’re skins for Apple’s Mobile Safari rendering engine. Opera Mini is different. As a proxy browser, it doesn’t actually load Web pages at all. Rather, it sends a request to Opera’s servers, which loads the page, compresses it by 80-90%, and sends your phone a compressed image of the page.

The result is extremely fast page load times. Opera Mini is faster than Safari even on good 3G; a NYTimes.com page that loaded in 22 seconds on Safari loaded in 10 on Opera, and I saw similar or even better results on other pages.

But on EDGE—or on bad 3G—Opera simply smoked Safari. An Adobe.com page that took a minute and 40 seconds to load with Safari loaded 30 seconds faster with Opera. A NYTimes.com page that took two minutes with Safari took a mere 34 seconds with Opera. Opera made browsing on slow networks possible.

Beyond Speed
The program has some other appealing features beyond speed. Opera Mini starts up to a “speed dial” screen of nine bold, graphical bookmarks. It’s a multi-window browser like Safari, but you don’t have to leave the page you’re browsing to flick through your other windows; they appear in a bar at the bottom of the screen. Settings lets you tinker with your font sizes and synchronize your bookmarks with Opera on the desktop.

But I’m disappointed with the lack of multiple zoom levels and how many of the buttons don’t look like standard iPhone user interface elements. (Copy-and-paste, for instance, works, but the pop-up menu doesn’t look like iPhone copy-and-paste.) Opera Mini has two levels of zoom. Pages start out zoomed way out, to an unreadable level. Tap once to zoom in and center on what you’re tapping on; most text columns are automatically reformatted for the width of the screen.

Opera is for basic Web browsing. It doesn’t support video, audio, or Flash. Fonts seem to be hammered down to a very limited set. Opera can’t handle interactive Web apps like Safari does. Because it’s transferring compressed data, Opera Mini pages are basically static; if you click on a button or pop up a calendar, it often reloads the whole page.

Opera Mini 5 won’t replace Safari. Safari is a more capable browser and is better integrated into the iPhone experience. Rather, Apple approving Opera Mini is a shot at AT&T’s network problems. In a perfect world with perfect networks, iPhones wouldn’t need this browser. But when AT&T fails, Opera Mini will have you surfing while everyone else around you is stuck trying to load pages. That makes it a valuable, if niche, product for the iPhone.

When Opera Software announced late Monday that its Opera Mini browser would hit the iPhone App Store, we guessed it wouldn’t be long before we saw other browser-makers follow suit by producing similar efforts that get around Apple’s restrictions facing iPhone browsers that compete with the native Safari.
Looks like our guess was correct. On Tuesday, Skyfire, another mobile browser maker, blogged a post congratulating Opera for its success and stating Skyfire’s intention to speed up its own development for “iDevices” like the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.
Of course, as a competitor, it is Skyfire CEO Jeff Glueck’s prerogative to point out that Skyfire supports Flash and plays back video with its mobile proxy browser where Opera Mini for iPhone doesn’t.

by pcmag.com and news.cnet.com