Opera Mini Web Browser - iPhone App

As far as I know, this is the first legitimate third party web browser that Apple has approved for use; which is a pretty big accomplishment in itself. If you haven't tried it yet, or even heard of it, I would suggest you give it a try. My time with it has shown to have much faster load times on almost any page compared to the native Safari browser. Also, it has a "tab" feature that I prefer over the page switching of Safari, and other features such as a "Speed Dial" page for quick access to frequently visited sites. Although, as nice as some of it features are, I have noticed two pretty big shortcomings:

1. It doesn't seem to load the iPhone formatted web apps like Safari does. For example, any Google web app does not load like you would be familiar with. You either have to deal with the basic HTML site, or the generic mobile web site. This also happens with other sites such as ESPN, Facebook, Wikipedia, and I'm sure just about everything else.

2. Zooming and multitouch don't work as expected. You single tap to zoom, which can be pretty handy actually, but, there is no fine tuning with pinch-to-zoom support. This leaves you stuck with either viewing the entire page, or a single element. There is no in between.

If they can fix these two problems it would be a five star app, no question. For now I give it about three out of five, as it doesn't take advantage of the full iPhone experience, but it's pretty dang fast. However, if you surf full web sites on a regular basis, this will soon become your preference over Safari.

Opera Mini Web Browser (Caution: Launches iTunes)