June 26, 2014 at 16:15

New Opera Mini 8 for iOS



    Today we release Opera Mini 8 for iOS. This is a completely new application that for the first time immediately offers three browser modes, two of which save you time and money, and also help to get better speed on slow connections. If you upgrade Opera Mini to iOS, the browser will continue to work in Mini mode, if you install the browser for the first time, it will work in Turbo mode. You can easily switch the desired mode in the menu under the “O” button.

    Let's look at all three modes in more detail.

    Mini mode


    In this mode, 244 million Opera Mini users are looking at your site. You can use this mode to check how your site works through the Opera Mini server. This mode directs all traffic through Opera Mini servers, which render pages and compress them to 90% before sending to the device.

    Thanks to this mode, pages load much faster, and if you pay for every megabyte in bloodthirsty roaming, then you also save money. But for the sake of this convenience, you have to make some sacrifices: animations, gradients, rounded corners, and other CSS beauties are discarded during compression. Images in SVG format are supported, but instead of animating in SVG, you will see only the first frame. Web fonts are also not supported to save traffic, so you should use SVG icons, not icon fonts. JavaScript works, but with some limitations. You can read more about the features of Opera Mini in the article " JavaScript and Opera Mini " on Dev.Opera.

    The Opera Mini servers use our old, but very effective for such tasks, Opera Presto engine with the following UA:

    Opera/9.80 (iPhone; Opera Mini/8.0.0/34.2336; U; en) Presto/2.8.119 Version/11.10

    We are currently working on upgrading Opera Mini servers to the latest version of Opera Presto with support for units remand Flexbox. As soon as this update happens, all Opera Mini users will immediately receive all the benefits of the new engine. Unfortunately, we do not yet have an exact date when this update will happen.

    If you rely on the user's IP to determine their country or region, then note that in the Opera Mini headers you will receive the IP addresses of our servers and your user may suddenly find you somewhere in Iceland. We pass the original IP of the user in an additional header X-Forwarded-For, so be careful.

    Turbo mode


    Opera Turbo mode is very different from Opera Mini mode. In this mode, all rendering of the site takes place directly on your device, but some pictures and media resources are compressed on our servers. CSS and JavaScript work as usual, HTTPS traffic goes directly through the device, bypassing the Turbo server.

    Since pages are not sent through our servers in this mode, the browser has a different UA:

    Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) OPiOS/8.0.0.78129 Mobile/11D201 Safari/9537.53

    To comply with paragraph 2.17 of the App Store publishing rules, we are forced to use not our usual Blink and V8 engine, but the built-in ones in iOS - the same ones that use the built-in Safari browser.

    Turbo mode is preferable for most cases when you need to save traffic or make your site load faster. You can control the quality of image compression using the slider in the advanced settings in the same menu under the red “O”.

    Please note that if Turbo mode is turned on, the IP address also changes to the address of one of our servers, so for the correct IP you also need to look at the header X-Forwarded-For.

    Uncompressed mode


    This mode, suddenly, does not apply any compression - everything happens on the device side. This mode works best in situations where your device is on a fast and stable network and you need the highest quality pictures. In this case, the UA is the same as in the case of Turbo mode, but the IP remains original.

    QR codes


    Opera Mini 8 for iOS includes a QR code scanner for quickly entering addresses or searching for other information encrypted in the code. Open the address bar of the browser and right above the keyboard you will see the icon of the QR scanner, which opens the camera and starts searching for the code.

    But you can not only read QR codes, but also generate them - for example, to share links. Open the menu under the red “O” and select the QR code icon in the standard iOS “share” menu.

    We thought it would be nice to add the same functionality to the browser for computers and wrote an extension for Opera. The QR Codematic extension can generate QR codes with a link to the current page or with any selected text. But the coolest thing is that this extension can read QR codes using your webcam and APIgetUserMedia. Try it, it is very convenient.

    Tips for the Advanced


    We have filled the new Opera Mini for iOS with a bunch of interesting little things that can be found with due persistence. Here are some tips for advanced users:

    • You can close tabs in the viewing mode not one at a time, but several at once - how many fingers you have
    • On the keyboard is a slider that allows you to conveniently work with text in the address bar. Simple left-right movements move the cursor, holding the slider allows you to select parts of the address.
    • Holding a plus in viewing tabs opens a list of recently closed tabs
    • If you pull the express panel down, the address bar will open
    • If you pull down the page, you can refresh it with a simple gesture, without clicking on any buttons

    You can’t imagine what kind of stone fell off your shoulders - my colleagues and I have been using the new Opera Mini 8 for iOS for about a month now and have been eager to share all these beauties with you. And finally, you can.

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