Opera Mini submitted for App Store approval — without pinch-to-zoom

Opera has submitted the iPhone version of its Opera Mini web browser to Apple for App Store approval and while the app is still shrouded in secrecy, some more details have emerged.

The New York Times has seen Opera Mini in action on the iPhone and while the demo reportedly used an early version of the app, its performance was nevertheless impressive. Web pages apparently loaded quickly and the app has a few features than are lacking in Safari on the iPhone, including tabbed browsing (we presume true on-screen tabs, since Safari can open multiple web pages) and in-page text searches.

What’s less impressive is Opera’s apparent decision to omit pinch-to-zoom from the first version of the app — the company reckons that this “could” be added by an update at a later date.

There’s already a question mark about whether or not Opera Mini will be approved for the App Store, since Apple won’t allow applications that duplicate existing iPhone functionality without adding anything appreciably new, nor web browsers based on anything but Safari’s WebKit engine.

The gamble is that since Opera Mini isn’t a web browser in the strictest sense, but merely a viewer for pages that are loaded and compressed by a remote server (hence the speedy web page rendering), Apple will give it a free pass. The question about how it handles executable code (another no-no for Apple) still remains unanswered, but the fact that it doesn’t support a key feature that defines much of the iPhone user experience seems like a grave mistake to us.

[ New York Times]