Opera On iPhone: 6X Faster Browsing

The Mobile World Congress 2010 is taking place this week (Feb 15th-18th) in Barcelona this year and there are tons of surprises, like the Windows Phone 7 series launching. But the latest surprise involves Opera, that ‘other browser’ that people tend to forget about. Opera has an interesting trick up their sleeve. They’ve developed an iPhone browser that’s 6 times faster than anything on the market.

Here are the details…

The App

It hasn’t officially be given the go-ahead through Apple’s red-tape app selection process, but the Opera team seems pretty confident that it’ll be allowed. The Opera Mini browser is designed to give you the web, and give it to you fast. At the MWC 2010, the Opera team showed off their browser that uses Opera’s special server-side compression technology to bring huge web pages down to size and increase your browsing experience.

How much smaller? Roughly 90%.

Basically, when you pop in a URL in your browser, the app calls out to Opera’s special servers. There, the server communicates with the site, dynamically compresses it along with any javascript or markup languages, and then shoots it back down to your device in Opera’s special format. The result? It all happens way faster than downloading the raw content to your phone, and you have a faster more usable browsing experience.

The Problems

Some of you may already see we’re I’m going with this. The issue of course, is privacy. The MacRumor’s article that reported on this didn’t exactly delve into that question. Where does that data go on Opera’s compression browser? There’s no real word yet on how that works. Is this compression server unattended? Can Opera track user-use? If you’re using HTTPS, and it caches and compresses — say — a page full of your bank information or social security number, how long does that compressed data stay on the server?

Ah, and then there’s problem number two: Will Apple allow it? Since technically, all the funky code goes on server-side, it avoids the restriction of running javascript and other code on the iPhone. And of course, will Apple allow an application that boasts better performance than their existing Safari browser? Maybe that’s a little conspiratorial, but I wouldn’t put it past Steve Jobs to indefinitely delay the Opera-for-iPhone browser until Safari gets some new little technology speed bump.

Lastly, there’s the problem if volume. Quite simply: If this thing kicks off, can Opera’s servers handle the volume of millions of requests from millions of users? That’ll be quite a feat.

Since the App hasn’t officially been submitted yet, we’ll still be waiting to see the outcome. Nevertheless, the technology behind Opera’s browser is impressive. It’s an innovative new solution to a mobile-web problem that’s plagued people for years: how do I shrink the experience and still make it usable?

Either way, cheers to Opera for making something uniquely new.