Opera Mini iPhone Browser Hits Top Spot On Apple App Chart

Opera Mini Browser for iPhone has become the most downloaded application on Apple's App store with more than one million certified downloads in its first day of availability on the 22 featured Apple App stores.

By this afternoon however, the application fell to third place, behind Simon: Classic and Bird Strike from PikPok. The first reviews of the application have been mostly positive and should provide with some welcomed competition for Apple's own Safari browser.

It is significantly faster than the latter but still lack some important features like offering graduated pinch and zoom functionality or the ability to add web links to the iPhone's home page.

Opera also heavily compresses and caches pages that are downloaded which save precious resources for the mobile network operators as well although the downside is the fact that reproducing the pages back on the phone's browser sometimes yields artefacts.

Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software, said in a statement that “Today iPhone users have a choice, and, as the numbers show, they are eager to explore new and faster ways to surf the Web on the iPhone - especially during heavy Web traffic”.

Apple surprised everyone in the tech market by approving the submission of Opera Mini on the 13th of April.