Opera’s longtime browser strategy has centered on supporting
as many devices as possible. Adding to that, the company is now offering Opera
Mini 6 browser for iOS, capable of running on both the iPhone and the iPad.
The iOS-supporting browser complements Opera Mini and Opera
Mobile available for Android devices. Opera’s products for both platforms are
essentially the same at first glance, with subtle cosmetic differences in the
respective user interfaces. Both Android and iOS versions feature tabbed
browsing and speed optimization.
Opera Mini 6 for iOS succeeds 2010’s version, which Opera
issued as a free app in Apple’s App Store. That was the only way to disseminate
the browser to as many iPhones as possible, Opera CEO Lars Boilesen told eWEEK
in March 2010, because posting it on Opera’s Website would have only made it
available for jailbroken iPhones.
With Opera Mini 6 for iOS, as with the browser versions
available for other mobile devices, Opera’s engineers have focused on speeding
up the browser experience, with up to 90 percent compression of data traffic
between the device and Opera’s servers. Opera claims that the strongest base
for its software exists in Central and Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia—places
where the majority of devices present in a particular area might be outdated or
operating on a painfully slow connection, and thus could benefit from that sort
of optimization.
That geographical orientation, executives have insisted in
the past, leads to Opera being undercounted by many analysis firms, which tend
to take their samples for browser market share from Western Europe and North
America.
Opera introduced its Opera Mini 6 browser for Android,
BlackBerry, Symbian and J2ME devices March 22, just in time for the CTIA
conference in Orlando, Fla. It also debuted the Opera Mobile 11 browser, intended
for Android, Symbian, and Windows 8 desktops, as well as lab releases of the
MeeGo and Maemo platforms. Features included fully optimized pinch-to-zoom and
the ability to post information on social networks via a built-in “share”
button—both of which carried over to Opera Mini 6 for iOS.
Despite Opera’s focus on the newest technology, Opera
co-founder Jon von Tetzschner told eWEEK in March 2011 that the company would
continue to fully support older versions of its browser, the better to run on
the more antiquated machines that continue to hold a presence in the company’s
key markets.
Part of Opera’s development process, he said at the time,
was to give “the best of care onto all devices as soon as possible.”
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