My favorite Internet browser, Opera, has just been released for the iPhone. It is free and means that Apple is finally relinquishing some control over their famed mobile platform. Opera is awesome on the iPhone! It is faster, smoother, has tons of navigation options, including the speed dial and the full screen, and can be configured just the way you like. Now Safari is collecting dust, much like IE…

The secret recipe that makes Opera blazingly fast are the Opera’s mini servers. Opera on the iPhone relays all its traffic through the mini servers. The servers proxy and cache all the requests, translate webpages, css and javascript into a more compact format and downsize images. They also use SOCKS protocol for maintaining a connection with the iPhone. That allows them to provide push updates to the iPhone and  helps to do away with all the HTTP/REST overhead while keeping connection handshake/teardown to a minimum.

PS. Yes, there is a catch. The mini servers terminate SSL before it reaches the phone in order to cache and downsize encrypted pages. Why they made that sacrifice is beyond me, but this means that there is no end-to-end encryption in the Opera Mini browser. So, if you plan to do banking on your iPhone and are slightly paranoid you might what to stick to Safari. Just remember, it is still going through AT&T’s mobile data network.