Opera Mini for the iPhone was downloaded more than one million times during the first day of its release, Opera said Thursday.
On Monday evening, Opera Software announced that Apple had approved Opera Mini, the first alternative Web browser for its iPhone. After 24 hours, the free app was downloaded to 1,023,380 Apple devices, the company reported.
To get approval from Apple, however, Opera Mini could not be a true browser because Apple’s developer agreement forbids alternative JavaScript engines, and possibly Web rendering engines, from being released for the iPhone. But as Daring Fireball’s John Gruber pointed out, Opera Mini doesn’t actually render Web pages; it renders a compressed markup language called OBML, making Opera Mini more like a PDF reader than a Web browser.
Nonetheless, Opera said that iPhone users now “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,” according to Lars Boilesen, chief executive of Opera.
Resource:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2362734,00.asp
