Opera Mini on iPhone goes back and forth without havin' gone nowhere

Harald, you don't seem to

Harald, you don't seem to realize "Objective C" and "C" are two different languages.

The next time you want to attack someone for "ignorance", you better not demonstrate ignorance yourself.

Herald, 1st of all, get

Herald, 1st of all, get ahold of yourself. This is just a blogpost, not a unibomber manifesto.

Thanks for the typo correction.

Go look up Opera Mini vs. Opera Mobile. I think you might be barking up the wrong tree.

You'd save yourself some serious flaming time if you did some research first.

Do you seriously think your arrogance is lessened by censorship?

Someone that follows this blog on a regular basis might have seen a reply to Seth's last comment, that appeared only briefly before vanishing without a trace. I can assure you I did not arrange for this censorship, the author simply seemed to think the easiest way to deal with fact-based criticism was to pretend it doesn't exist.

Well, Mr. Weintraub, sorry to break your bubble, but as a journalist you actually have to be able to answer for your writings, especially when it contains misinformation. So for the interest of the general public, I will submit my comment again. Let's see how long it takes before your your dictator-style moderation strikes again.

Original comment:

Seff, first of all, on the subject of typos, it's Harald. Not Herald. If we're gonna really quibble about typos, I could also point out that your headline is a double negative[1], thereby implying Opera Mini actually *has* gone somewhere. I chose to stay on topic instead, but obviously this didn't provide you with a clearer understanding of the situation.

Secondly, I know it's a blog post. But if you're gonna cherrypick parts of quotes from personal blogs to fit your view of reality, surely I can take your misinformed statements as Computerworld's official stand on the matter, no?

Thirdly, I know perfectly well the difference between Opera Mini and Opera Mobile, and pointed it out several times in my comment. You must have read only parts of that too..
Like I said, all Opera products use the same rendering engine; Presto. No product, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile included, uses a "stripped down" version of it.[2]
Opera Mini however functions slightly differently, due to there being a proxy transcoder inbetween.[3]
I am also fully aware that Opera Mini is quite unlikely to outperform Safari anytime soon, on iPhone or otherwise, but you suddenly started dragging Fennec into it. My point was that if you were going to completely disregard the real need for bandwidth-saving compressing proxy services like you chose to do, and rather talk about full-fledged browsers that could fare well on the iPhone in general, Opera Mobile would be a much safer bet than this week's vaporware Gecko project.[4]
Unlike Mozilla, Opera has already delivered a full-fledged web browser running on cellphones for eight years[5], since a good six years before Steve Jobs proclaimed to the world that he had invented mobile browsing.[6] It's been ported to just about every mobile OS you can name, and its customer list includes more or less all of the world's largest handset manufacturers. Do you *really* think they would ignore Apple's success and skip porting to iPhone OS just to make a good story? Which wasn't even a story before it suddenly got picked up by the blogosphere?

Fourthly, isn't "do some research first", without actually addressing *any* of the fully valid concerns I raised the sort of childish non-argument that tends to get modded down on sites where actual discussion is encouraged?
Such as the fact that think Opera Mini on the iPhone is inconceivable since it would need to be ported to C *because Opera developers are not talented enough to even learn the language*, completely ignoring the fact that it has already been ported to the C-based[7] platform known as BREW, and that every non-Mini browser from Opera is written in C[8]?

Fifthly, I have now counted to five. You never got past one, hardly even that. Did you have any even vague interest in trying to defend what you have written, or do you feel that leaving the post as it stands, with blatant errors and misleading conclusions, is just fine?

- Harald

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_negative
[2] http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/presto-2-1-web-standards-supported-by/
[3] http://dev.opera.com/articles/mobile/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimo
[5] http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2000/07/20000706.dml
[6] http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/live-from-macworld-2007-steve-jobs-keynote/
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Runtime_Environment_for_Wireless#BREW_application_development
[8] http://www.opera.com/company/chat/party/trond/

As you might have gathered, I have gone to the trouble of adding helpful footnotes to this comment. Hopefully this should save you, the journalist, some bothersome research time, while you are busy asking others to do the same.

- Harald

Computerworld policies

Harald,

Blog comments are moderated by system administrators, not by Mr. Weintraub.

Any comment with more than one link becomes suspicious to our spam filter. This is good security, not wanton censorship.

Had the issue been reported two months ago when the issue seems to have arisen, we might've been able to determine why a message was taken down. At this point, I see no evidence of this having occurred.

Ken Gagne
Associate Editor,
Community Content
Computerworld.com

Re: Opera Schmopera

"Safari on the iPhone runs circles around Opera Mini"

Not if you don't have an unlimited data plan and/or your connection isn't optimal. In both these scenarios, Opera Mini is better (cheaper and faster).

"OM was a desirable for previous generation phones only because it was better than any browser for mobiles that had existed before OM."

Opera Mini is desirable today, too, with lots of people with limited data plans and poor connections.