Opera Mini provides an interesting alternative to Safari on your iPhone. Not only is it a faster browser, but it makes accessing and managing pages a lot easier.
The great thing about Opera Mini is the technology it uses to render pages. Opera has its own servers, which are used to compress page data by up to 90% before sending it to your iPhone. You may not notice much of a difference in terms of the time it takes to actually fetch a page but once the page has been served everything displays instantaneously, where Safari often takes time to load all the various page elements.
Start page and tabs
Opera Mini makes navigating the Web a bit easier than it is in Safari. For instance, there's a speed dial-style Start Page that lets you program nine of your favorite sites that can be launched with a single tap. Opera Mini boasts an easy-to-use tabbed browsing tool for switching between pages.
Tap the Tabs icon and you'll get a dock with thumbnails of each page you have open. You can simply swipe through to the one you want to show then tap to open it. Unlike Safari, Opera Mini doesn't reload an open page every time you go back to it. Introduced in version 6 of Opera Mini is the ability to open links as tabs in the background, which works very nicely.
Moving around
Navigating web pages with Opera Mini is a joyous process, especially since the latest version corrected the horrid zoom of past releases. Zooming and panning is much smoother now, although still not as slick as it is in Safari.
There are lots of other time-saving features within Opera Mini for iPhone. The app includes address auto-complete, a Find in Page tool, and it can remember passwords. It also comes with support for Opera Link, which lets you synchronize your bookmarks with your desktop version of Opera, and a Share button for quickly sending links over Facebook or Twitter.
Opera Mini boasts long-click menus that allow you to quickly perform actions such as opening a link in a new tab, editing the Start Page and selecting text, just by holding your finger down on the screen.
One thing worth noting is that Opera Mini doesn't always render pages correctly, and many users have pointed to examples of sites not functioning as fully as they do in Safari.
Overall though, Opera Mini is a good alternative to Safari, with faster loading times and lots of useful web browsing tools.
Matt Perkins
With Apple's picky ways when it comes to apps for iPhone, very few browsers are accepted into the app store. Opera is one of those exceptions by claiming it wasn't a browser, it made it into the... More
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