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Opera Mini 8 for iOS

itunes.apple.com

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Re: Opera Mini 8 for iOS

#2

Post by girvo »

I've been a massive fan of Opera Mini for years now, and this is really impressive! I wonder how it's implemented? Years ago, on Windows Mobile (not Windows Phone) it struggled with Javascript. Is that still the case? Is it merely UIWebView + a proxy to do the compression?

Re: Opera Mini 8 for iOS

#4

Post by Synaesthesia »

girvo wrote: post #2

I've been a massive fan of Opera Mini for years now, and this is really impressive! I wonder how it's implemented? Years ago, on Windows Mobile (not Windows Phone) it struggled with Javascript. Is that still the case? Is it merely UIWebView + a proxy to do the compression?

I believe it does server side compression and JavaScript parsing, then sends it to the device in a compressed format. So technically it's not really even a web browser.

Re: Opera Mini 8 for iOS

#5

Post by RamunasM »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #4
girvo wrote: post #2

I've been a massive fan of Opera Mini for years now, and this is really impressive! I wonder how it's implemented? Years ago, on Windows Mobile (not Windows Phone) it struggled with Javascript. Is that still the case? Is it merely UIWebView + a proxy to do the compression?

I believe it does server side compression and JavaScript parsing, then sends it to the device in a compressed format. So technically it's not really even a web browser.

Kind of. Current version has 3 modes. Regular browser, Mini mode (which sends pre-rendered web pages back to the phone) and Turbo mode which compresses images and videos.

Using Turbo mode for now, best of both worlds - data savings and compatability with all websites.

Re: Opera Mini 8 for iOS

#8

Post by grrowl »

Touche wrote: post #7

Does this use Blink? If not, that's a shame.

The "Opera Mini" mode renders webpages into a specialised format (OBML), so they function more like interactive images; I'd bet they finally implemented a OBML rendering/UX layer for iOS. "Opera Turbo" would be a standard iOS UIWebView except it routes your requests through a caching and optimisation server for smaller payload and quicker downloads.

Chrome on iOS renders in a UIWebView, too, and enables a similar "bandwidth saving proxy" technique by default which achieves similar results.

More about Opera Mini's compression, OBML (outdated but gives a good overview): http://dev.opera.com/articles/opera-binary-markup-language/

Sadly, I seem to only be able to install the previous version of the app which is a vastly different experience to the screenshots in the App Store. It might not have caught up to Australia's cache servers yet.

Re: Opera Mini 8 for iOS

#10

Post by ytch »

girvo wrote: post #2

I've been a massive fan of Opera Mini for years now, and this is really impressive! I wonder how it's implemented? Years ago, on Windows Mobile (not Windows Phone) it struggled with Javascript. Is that still the case? Is it merely UIWebView + a proxy to do the compression?

Since Apple only allow browsers use built-in webkit engine in iOS. The turbo mode is use Opera's proxy to compress data, and render them by webkit. Therefore the user agent says they are AppleWebKit:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) OPiOS/8.0.0.78865 Mobile/11D201 Safari/9537.53

But for "Opera Mini" mode, it will render the page at their server, then send to iOS device. so they can bypass the limit from Apple and save many bandwidth. Therefore the user agent is complete different:

Opera/9.80 (iPhone; Opera Mini/8.0.0/35.3088; U; zh) Presto/2.8.119 Version/11.10

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