Posts tagged Apple

Last night Apple shocked the world by approving the very first browser that isn’t Safari. Opera announced about a month or so ago that they had submitted their mini version of their browser to the App Store and were waiting for either approval or denial. There was basically nobody out there that though Apple would approve the app. Apple has a very good history of not approving apps that they have already made that comes stock on the phone. Basically they don’t want anybody to realize that somebody out there can make a better program than they can. But, for whatever reason, this time they gave Opera the go ahead.

The app was relaased late last night and I grabbed it first thing this morning. Right off the bat I liked it better than Safari. I liked the look and the feel of it much better. It actually feels like a real internet browser. Your main screen in a nice tiled 9 box quick launch menu, just like most people are familiar with on most PC browsers now a days. You can edit all 9 and change them to whatever sites you frequent the most. The tabbed browsing is great. Safari does allow for multiple pages to be opened at the same time but the way you scroll through them just wasn’t very cool. This is more like tabbed on a regular browser but actually even a little bit cooler the way that you can flick through them to pick which page you want to open.

The main thing is the speed. I’m not a big enough tech nerd to even pretend like I understand the reasons why, but Opera did something so that the pages load much faster than they do in Safari. So that alone is a huge selling point for making the switch.

Now, the app is far from perfect though. There is a couple glitches that I noticed right away. The pinch and zoom and the scrolling are both kind of choppy. Also some of the smaller words on the screen basically become just little blurry lines that you can’t read at all. I’ve compared NY Times on Safari and Opera and for whatever reason that site in particular looks much better on Safari. But I’m sure that all of those things will be fixed in time as Opera starts rolling out some updates.

I’m really hoping that because Apple approved this one that maybe now they’ll start letting some other 3rd party browsers onto the App Store. Hopefully it actually starts a nice little browser war of sorts, ’cause let’s face it Opera isn’t quite the big dog in the PC browser market anymore. Maybe Firefox will give an iPhone browser a go, even though they’ve said they flat out wont’, but you know they’re going to want to get their fair share of the iPhone market. I would love to see a Google Chrome browser but we all know that just won’t happen now that Apple and Google aren’t really friends anymore because of the whole Android thing. So I’m not going to hold my breathe for that one.

So good for Apple on this one. This time I think they really listened to what the actual users wanted and not just give us what they say we want.

I’ll leave you with a little video that Opera posted a month or so ago showing off Opera Mini on the iPhone…