Opera Mini takes over the App Store Charts

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'.<p>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.

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

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 <i>on mobile platforms</i> (edited to specify mobile): <a href="http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-200910-200910-bar" rel="nofollow">http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-200910-...</a><p>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&#38;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.<p>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).

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 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).<p>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.<p>I agree with John Gruber:<p><i>"I can’t see recommending this app to anyone other than those who use the EDGE network frequently.<p>But: it’s free."</i><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262790" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262790</a>

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.

Since Opera Mini apparently uses an intermediary cloud server, how does it handle ajax-heavy sites?<p>I'm thinking of sites that update every second or so.

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.<p>Now, if there were charts for the apps people actually <i>USE</i>…

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

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?

people want what they can't have.