Opera Mini 5

Opera Mini 5 has finally come out for iPhone/iPod touch. It took a little over a month for Apple to accept this app into the App Store and now it is there as the main competitor to Safari. Opera Mini is more like Safari than Safari itself. Opera Mini has a home screen full with your favourite sites, much like Safari on the computer. The Opera Mini servers compress sites up to 90% making web browsing extremely fast. However because of this compression it makes it hard to read as it blends and fuses together to a big jumble of lines on the page.

In terms of aesthetics it's very nice, sleek with vibrant colours and a nice array of options to customize your browser. In Opera Mini you have the option of viewing your web pages in a normal view, as you would see it on the computer or a mobile view, which is a more raw and simpler version of the page. With this you can customize your browser to do what you want it to. If you have slow Internet speeds, set it to mobile and sites will load in milliseconds.

Pros:

Great interface
Mobile/Normal page viewing
Quick load times
Bookmarks on front page

Cons:

Data compression can make text fuse together
Google search often takes you back to home page
Don’t mean to be picky, but it doesn’t look nice on your home screen/doesn’t look like it's made by Apple

Rating: 7.5/10

Comments

[Tanner]

i have heard it loads quick because it's on opera's own serve, so if there serve goes down there's no surfing the web on that browser for you, also heard it keeps track of your password.i don't know about you but i don't need a company tracking my passwords thank you

[Hunter]

@Tanner
Let me actually explain how that works: It's not housed on Opera's servers.... if that were true, they would be hosting the entire internet.
Opera has a technology which basically SENDS each page page to their servers, and compresses it. It is then sent back to your browser in it's compressed form, saving you several megabytes of data to download, and making it faster.

I would imagine if their servers went down, it would merely ignore the compression and things would still work(just not as fast).

As for saving your passwords, Safari has this functionality to. I doubt it's stored on any servers ;| just local storage.

[John Holland]

I like Opera alot and use it on my main PC, this is good news for me because I live I don't have an unlimited data plan for my iphone so browsing can be expensive, opera's compression technology is one of the main reasons I'm going to use it, it will save me a "packet" in data costs, mind the pun.

[Mark]

it doesn't look like apple, because its not made by apple, stupid shit.