Opera Mini takes over the App Store Charts | Hacker News Reader

Opera Mini takes over the App Store Charts

apple.com

124 pointsmicrypt60 comments

If 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.

Why? 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.

And 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.

The behavior of installing other browsers or god forbid multiple browsers, isn't a mainstream one though.

It'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.

I 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.

Absolutely. But word-of-mouth success is still success (God knows there are failed word-of-mouth efforts). The point is that it successfully spread beyond tech circles. Opera hasn't done this yet (at least not in the US, outside of mobile), but there's still hope that it might.

The tech population may be the early adopters. Once you are in the top, you are more likely to stay there.

Its bound to given the "free" publicity it gained, in my opinion it isn't borne out by the quality of the app though.

The 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.

I 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.

Agreed. And Opera usage certainly doesn't seem to be growing. I really wish it was more standards compliant :/

"I really wish it was more standards compliant :/"

uh What? It is and always has been one of the most compliant...

Sorry, 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).

Traditionally, I think of Opera as the browser not afraid to be truly standards compliant, even if it means little differences between FF/Safari. I have seen examples of this, sorry that I can't find them now. Personally I'm happy to have Opera in this role, because I think it's an important role.

If something does need to be fixed "for Opera", it's generally only a tiny CSS change, as opposed to the kinds of structural overhauls IE will make you wrestle with.

In short, in the name of standards, I think it would be nice if FF etc did things exactly the same as Opera :)

Can opera even do things like border-radius yet?

Yes, as of version 10.50: http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/windows/1050/

This isn't about Opera, but just backing up the "renders different != non-compliant" thought - I just fixed a rendering bug in one of my pages that only showed up in Google Chrome. It turned out that Chrome was behaving correctly and that Firefox and IE were not. When I fixed the CSS rule, they were all happy.

Sometimes the one who is different is the most correct. Maybe if you satisfy Opera first, you won't have as many problems with the others.

By this argument, Firefox/safari/chrome should just copy what IE does, because IE has the biggest market share.

@Cory Matthews:

Compared to IE? Yes. Compared to Firefox? Depends on the release schedule of both. Compared to Chrome or Safari? It lags significantly behind.

You can reply directly to comments using the "reply" link. No need for @ style comments.

Given that he was using a reply link to make the comment, he probably knows they exist. There's a "flame retardant" feature that disables the reply link for a period immediately after a higher-nested comment was posted.

In that case you can still get one by using the "link" link to get to it.

Thanks, I didn't know about that work-around. Indeed, there was no reply link on that comment; I assumed, like every other comment system, there was a limit to nested levels.

They've long been the leader in the mobile market though, and while the PR has undoubtedly helped like crazy that probably would have carried them alone.

Yep, anyone who's ever owned a blackberry knows about opera mini and how great it is.

Surely that's only because the bundled blackberry browser is so doggedly useless, rather than opera mini excelling by itself?

It's no different to Firefox/IE though. Nothing wrong with being relatively better, either.

Kevin Drum, a liberal political blogger, has recently adopted Opera as his web browser and has been posting about it:

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/03/opera-after-month

In countries where unlimited data plans are rare, it could save people money on data charges.

Its bound to given the "free" publicity it gained, in my opinion it isn't borne out by the quality of the app though.

As far as I know, it does exactly what it's supposed to. Browsing is several times faster. Resolution is compromised to this end, but that's a trade off that I'm willing to take. It's better to have enough resolution to navigate than full resolution with a browser that's unusably slow.

I wish there was an iPad version!

News 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-...

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.

As 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).

On 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.

Every 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-header...

How 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?

I 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

I 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.

>> "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-...

I 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.

I 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.

Impressive, 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.

I'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

This. Zoom doesn't work in landscape, you can't control the zoom level, and I've had various things like checkboxes be completely unusable.

That'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.

It 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.

On 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.

Since 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.

Short 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/#...

Thanks 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.

I'm glad you had the chance to try it and find it not to your liking.

It’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.

HN 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.

Of 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…

Honest question: Can you view flash content in Opera Mini ?

No.

It 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.

Am I the only one who can't get Hacker News to show on it?

Possibly, since I'm posting this from Opera Mini. That said, everyone who says its buggy and slow are bang on.

It took about 5 minutes to load. MINUTES. I suspect they don't have any cache servers near Israel.

people want what they can't have.

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