Opera Mini 5 Submitted To the App Store

In early February news broke that a preview of Opera Mini was coming for the iPhone. Yesterday Opera announced they submitted their web browser to the App Store for approval. What’s interesting is Opera has publicly announced this and has even created an Opera Mini Countup contest. Talk about putting some pressure on Apple to approve this app, eh?

Opera has some features that Safari is missing, such as the ability to search for text on pages and slick tabbed browsing that allows multiple pages to be loaded at once. There’s also one touch to zoom and pages previously loaded stay loaded, which saves you data. Plus, the ability to save pages is available–a fantastic idea if you’re travelling out of country and want to save web pages beforehand.

Opera Mini 5 is being pushed as faster than Safari, based on the fact that Opera uses compression technology for its pages. Opera Mini 5 claims to be 6 times faster than Mobile Safari! What makes it render so fast?

Due to server-side rendering, Opera Mini compresses data by up to 90 percent before sending it to the phone, resulting in rapid page loading and more Web per MB for the end user.

Check out the following demo and let me know what you think of Opera Mini 5. The app is going to be free but the ball is in Apple’s court to approve it. Will it be approved? Here is John Gruber’s take:

My money, by the way, says Apple will accept the app. I know there’s much speculation that Apple won’t allow an alternative browser that doesn’t use the system version of WebKit, but Opera Mini isn’t doing JavaScript client-side, so it doesn’t break the “no interpreters” rule. Update: And if there’s a problem, I bet it’s the security ramifications of Opera Mini’s design.

Check out the following demo of Opera Mini 5, which includes a head to head speed test with Safari over EDGE:

Would you use Opera Mini 5 if it was approved in the App Store? I wonder what changes will come to Mobile Safari in iPhone OS 4.0!

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