30 ms·
Opera Mini takes over the App Store Charts
- tvon 16y agoImpressive, it's currently at the top for every country (for Free Apps). I guess that's what a very public review process will do for you.
- watmough 16y agoSince Opera Mini apparently uses an intermediary cloud server, how does it handle ajax-heavy sites? I'm thinking of sites that update every second or so.
- jarek 16y agoShort answer: it doesn't. Every Javascript change to the page after the onload has finished triggers a full reload. Long answer: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-mini-5-developers/#standardssupport http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-mini-5-developers/#...
- watmough 16y agoThanks for the answer. I just got round to trying it. It's awful. From the first screen onwards, it's everything that the iPhone is trying to leave behind. Clunky, unresponsive navigation, non-standard user controls. Utterly wretched. Delete ASAP.
- jarek 16y agoI'm glad you had the chance to try it and find it not to your liking.
- nfg 16y agoIts bound to given the "free" publicity it gained, in my opinion it isn't borne out by the quality of the app though.
- josefresco 16y agoThe publicity that Opera has gained has not been 'free' in the traditional sense of the word. They are a well known Internet brand who very publicly shared their app approval status with the world. While I do agree the PR they got has helped downloads, it's not like they were an unheard of brand that won the PR-superbowl.
- potatolicious 16y agoI dunno. I'm very happy for Opera - but their branding is not really strong at all outside of tech circles. A lot of "normal" people know about Firefox, but I've yet to meet someone who uses Opera, or even knows of it, who isn't significantly connected to our industry.
- axod 16y agoAgreed. And Opera usage certainly doesn't seem to be growing. I really wish it was more standards compliant :/
- CoryMathews 16y ago"I really wish it was more standards compliant :/" uh What? It is and always has been one of the most compliant...
- axod 16y agoSorry, I probably shouldn't have used the term 'standards compliant'. Don't get me wrong, it's far better than IE, but whereas if you get something working in firefox, it usually works as is in safari/chrome, there's sometimes little quirks in Opera. As a relatively small userbase use Opera, it'd just be nice if it did things exactly the same as firefox/Chrome - layout, scrolling, iframes, etc etc I can't remember specific details, but I often notice weird layout quirks, or issues with scrolling (Not well defined in any standard).
- ugh 16y agoIt’s free and it got a lot of press everywhere. What do you expect? Look at Bird Strike. It’s free this week and in 15 of the 22 shown top tens. It probably didn’t get nearly as much press as Opera.
- JMiao 16y agopeople want what they can't have.
- handelaar 16y agoIf a browser can top the download chart then the app-downloading population clearly has yet to go anywhere near the demographics of 'normal people'. Makes you wonder briefly just how incredibly large remains the room for changes in platform, share and whatnot in the whole smartphone/mobileOS arena. This little factoid makes it look absolutely vast to me.
- albertzeyer 16y agoWhy? A browser is nowadays one of the most important tools. If I would be able to use only one single application on my system, it would be a browser. And the same is true for almost everyone.
- handelaar 16y agoAnd the browser almost everyone will use is the one that came with the device, not one that almost nobody outside our nerdy circle has ever heard of, and absolutely nobody outside our nerdy circle would have known was released yesterday unless they read sites like the ones we frequent.
- axod 16y agoThe behavior of installing other browsers or god forbid multiple browsers, isn't a mainstream one though.
- powrtoch 16y agoIt's not as mainstream as we all might like, but I think the case of Firefox (over 30% usage share currently) makes it pretty clear that it's more than just tech nerds who care (at least a little) about browser choice.
- endlessvoid94 16y agoI disagree. I think Firefox's success is due to early-adopters and those same early-adopters telling their family and friends to do the same thing.
- andymoe 16y agoI tried it and the one really annoying thing about it is that because it serves up images of pre-rendered pages when you flip your phone to landscape the page image is the wrong dimension. It would be better if it sent you one image for your current orientation and then fetched in another in the back ground or something smarter like that. Maybe there are bandwidth concerns but it makes the user experience sub-par.
- adi92 16y agoHow are they making money from this? They need to run fast servers that cater to each and every phone that has their app installed anywhere in the world.. won't that be pretty expensive?
- barredo 16y agoI said it earlier and my ideas are: 1) brand awareness (people will actually start to know Opera web browsing solutions/Opera Software, which is a small brand/browser compared to Firefox or Chrome, don't even mention IE) 2) they make money driving traffic to the default websites on Opera Mini's speed dial homepage
- jarek 16y agoI suspect the brand awareness and popularity numbers (50 million users or whatever) are helpful when it comes to negotiations with manufacturers or carriers who might want to bundle the browser with phones out of the box. I expect Opera gets paid decently for that.
- axod 16y ago>> "Although the Opera browser will be a free app for download, the company’s revenue will increase thanks to advertising and search engines built into the web browser." from http://www.techjackal.net/internet/2010/04/14/opera-browser-develops-app-for-iphone/ http://www.techjackal.net/internet/2010/04/14/opera-browser-...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- shmichael 16y agoAm I the only one who can't get Hacker News to show on it?
- mattparcher 16y agoI'm not too impressed with the app, myself. The interface and interaction are buggy and non-native. I agree with John Gruber: "I can’t see recommending this app to anyone other than those who use the EDGE network frequently. But: it’s free." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262790 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262790
- mrcharles 16y agoThis. Zoom doesn't work in landscape, you can't control the zoom level, and I've had various things like checkboxes be completely unusable.
- guywithabike 16y agoThat's my assessment, too. Crummy UI and frustrating navigation. But thanks to San Francisco's terrible, awful, horrible, no-good 3G network, the speed improvement over Safari makes it worth it for basic pages, when it doesn't simply break the page.
- tensafefrogs 16y agoAs I understand it, every website you visit goes through Opera's servers to be compressed + processed. Isn't this a privacy issue? When Chrome came out and started doing query suggest (and sending your typing to google, etc.) people got all uppity about privacy, but I haven't seen one person mention privacy issues w/ the opera browser. Additionally, as a website owner, wouldn't this skew your user stats, since the request would come from Opera's servers and not directly from the phone (not 100% sure about this, but that's how it seems like it would work).
- powrtoch 16y agoOn the original post revealing Opera Mini for iPhone, there were pages and pages of people debating the security implications. Long story short: it does break end-to-end SSL, but unless you distrust Opera as a company, it's more of a theoretical issue than a practical concern.
- jarek 16y agoEvery website you visit on your laptop goes through your ISP. Every website you visit on your cell phone goes through your provider. Yes, it's a potential issue. Yes, there is trust involved. Any stats package worth its salt would record X-Forwarded-For information, which is set by the Mini proxies: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-mini-request-headers/#x-forwarded-for http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-mini-request-header...
- izendejas 16y agoNews flash: Opera mini has made a name for itself on every phone that runs Java. Opera at one point (perhaps still) had the largest market share on mobile platforms (edited to specify mobile): http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-200910-200910-bar http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-200910-... Opera mini is in beta, so it's supposed to be buggy. But searching for text within a page, significant speedup on EDGE (and if you're on AT&T's flaky network this is a plus), etc are all very good reasons to use this.
- jwr 16y agoOf course, what would you expect? Given the publicity, everyone downloaded it to try it. It's free. Now, if there were charts for the apps people actually USE…
- thought_alarm 16y agoIt received a preposterous amount of hype for what amounts to nothing more than a old-school mobile web browser with a terribly awkward user interface. It does serve to remind users just how good native iPhone apps are compared to cross-platform apps like Opera.
- teamonkey 16y agoOn a GPRS connection with a smaller screen with no multitouch the "terribly awkward" user interface is intuitive and makes a lot of sense. That's not what the iphone is though.
- jpablo 16y agoHonest question: Can you view flash content in Opera Mini ?
- twobar 16y agoNo.
- Osiris 16y agoI think what this really underscores is that people want choice, and so far Apple has not allowed any choice. Opera Mini is likely to be the only other browser available for the iPhone due to the restrictions of the SDK (can't wait for the new 3.3.1 clause to take effect). Whether or not it's good (I use it on Android for fast browsing, but it does have its quirks), people want options.
- dusing 16y agoIt also kinda sucks. Past loading the page fast, it is just hard to use, and everything renders so poorly. Proof of concept at this point.
- chett 16y agoHN looks better on Opera Mini compared to Safari. On first load I no longer needed to fiddle with the zoom level. It also wraps comments to fit the width of the screen when zooming in.