New Opera Mini 8 for iOS

Today we are releasing Opera Mini 8 for iOS. This is a completely new application that for the first time offers three browser modes at once, two of which save you time and money, as well as help to get better speed on slow connections. If you upgrade Opera Mini to iOS, the browser will continue to work in Mini mode, if you install the browser for the first time, it will work in Turbo mode. You can easily switch the desired mode in the menu under the “O” button.

Let's look at all three modes in more detail.
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Mini mode

In this mode, 244 million Opera Mini users are looking at your site. You can use this mode to check how your site works through Opera Mini servers. This mode directs all traffic through Opera Mini servers, which draw pages and compress them up to 90% before being sent to the device.

Thanks to this mode, the pages load much faster, and if you pay for each megabyte in bloodthirsty roaming, then you also save money. But for the sake of such convenience, one has to make some sacrifices: animations, gradients, rounded corners, and other CSS-beauty are discarded during compression. SVG images are supported, but instead of animation in SVG, you only see the first frame. Web fonts are also not supported to save traffic, so you should use SVG icons, and not icon fonts. JavaScript works, but with some limitations. Read more about the features of the Opera Mini can be found in the article " JavaScript and Opera Mini " on Dev.Opera.

The Opera Mini servers use our old, but very effective for such tasks, Opera Presto engine with the following UA:

Opera/9.80 (iPhone; Opera Mini/8.0.0/34.2336; U; en) Presto/2.8.119 Version/11.10 

We are currently working on upgrading Opera Mini servers to the latest version of Opera Presto with support for the units of measure rem and Flexbox. As soon as this update happens, all Opera Mini users will immediately get all the benefits of the new engine. Unfortunately, we do not yet have an exact date when this update will happen.

If you rely on the user's IP to determine his country or region, then note that in the Opera Mini headers you will receive the IP addresses of our servers and your user may suddenly find you somewhere in Iceland. We give the original user IP in the additional X-Forwarded-For header, so be careful.

Turbo mode

Opera Turbo mode is very different from Opera Mini mode. In this mode, the entire site rendering takes place directly on your device, but some pictures and media resources are compressed on our servers. CSS and JavaScript work as usual, HTTPS traffic goes directly through the device, bypassing the Turbo server.

Since in this mode, pages are not sent through our servers, the browser has a different UA:

 Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) OPiOS/8.0.0.78129 Mobile/11D201 Safari/9537.53 

To comply with clause 2.17 of the App Store publication rules, we are forced to use not our usual Blink and V8 engines, but the ones built into iOS — the same ones that the built-in Safari browser uses.

Turbo mode is preferable for most cases when you need to save traffic or make the site load faster. You can control the quality of image compression using the slider in the advanced settings in the same menu under the red “O”.

Please note that if Turbo mode is enabled, the IP address also changes to the address of one of our servers, so for a correct IP you also need to watch the X-Forwarded-For header.

Uncompressed mode

This mode, suddenly, does not apply any compression - everything happens on the device side. This mode works best in a situation where your device is on a fast and stable network and you need the highest quality pictures. In this case, the UA is the same as in the case of Turbo mode, but the IP remains original.

QR codes

Opera Mini 8 for iOS includes a QR code scanner to quickly enter addresses or search for other information encrypted in the code. Open the address bar of your browser and immediately above the keyboard you will see the QR-scanner icon, which opens the camera and starts searching for the code.

But you can not only read QR codes, but also generate them - for example, to share links. Open the menu under the red “O” and select the QR-code icon in the standard iOS “share” menu.

We thought it would be nice to add the same functionality to the browser for computers and wrote an extension for Opera. The QR Codematic extension is able to generate QR codes with reference to the current page or with any selected text. But the coolest thing is that this extension can read QR codes using your webcam and getUserMedia API. Try it, it is very convenient.

Advanced Tips

We have filled a new Opera Mini for iOS with a bunch of interesting little things that can be found with due perseverance. Here are some tips for advanced users:

• You can close tabs in the view mode not one at a time, but several at once - how many fingers are enough for you
• The keyboard is a slider that allows you to conveniently work with text in the address bar. Simple left-right movements move the cursor, holding the slider allows you to select parts of the address.
• Holding down the tabbed browsing plus opens a list of recently closed tabs.
• If you pull the express panel down, the address bar opens.
• If you pull down the page, you can update it with a simple gesture, without pressing any buttons

You have no idea what kind of stone fell from your shoulders - my colleagues and I have been using the new Opera Mini 8 for iOS for about a month and have been so impatient to share with you all these beauties. And now, finally, you can.