The iPhone’s Safari web browser is really good for casual web surfing, but it sucks when you’re limited to slower data speeds – like EDGE on AT&T. When that happens, it would be nice to have the option to use the Opera Mini browser – known for its fast page load speeds on slower connections – on the iPhone. To that end, Opera has submitted their Opera Mini browser to Apple in a bid to bring their speedy web browser to the AppStore. Unfortunately, that leaves us with nothing to do but wait for Apple’s decision on Opera Mini’s fate. Well, almost nothing.
We had a chance to preview the Opera Mini iPhone browser and pit it in a page load speed test against the iPhone’s native Safari web browser. The Safari browser uses the webkit rendering engine, so it’s great at loading full HTML web pages. But, when you’re note able to connect via 3G, you’re going to notice a real page-load slowdown. That’s where Opera’s Turbo technology comes into play. Opera Mini uses Turbo to process web pages through their servers and then sends the rendered pages to the browser for quick loading. The load times are significantly reduced with Opera Mini, as you can see in the video below.