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Comment by glymor | Hacker News Reader

The whole point of Opera Mini as an app is for them to rearrange your content; complaining that they can see the content seems schizophrenic.

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However, Opera needs to be sure to disclose/advertise the app as a proxy and not just a browser. Personally, I will never want to use a "browser" app with a proxy in the middle, but as long as others are fully aware of what they are downloading then they at least knowingly get to assume whatever risk is involved.

The people who actually care (i.e. you and I) already know about it. The people who don't care, have much bigger security concerns, IMO. Most people don't check for SSL when entering credit card information, so I doubt they would care about this if they thought it good speed up their browsing as much as Opera says it can.

edit: Though I do agree - I would trust them a little more if they were a little more outspoken about the security implications of what's going on.

I didn't know about it. I had Opera Mini on my old ADP1 and had no idea it was acting as a proxy viewer. Or maybe Opera Mini on Android isn't the same as the one currently submitted to Apple?

Huh... where do they say this? I assumed it was a normal browser.

It is not at all the point, the point is to provide a faster browsing experience, Opera servers rearranging the content is just a means to an end.

Indeed, if the iPhone was sufficiently powerful, it would be faster to do do the transformations locally.

edit: this is not a swipe at the iPhone, but support for the statement that using Opera's severs is not a functional requirement.

I don't think it's taken as a swipe at the iPhone, more that I think doing it locally would remove any performance/speed gains that it provides. Granted, you could still cache a certain amount of data locally, but browsers do that anyway.

That's rather my point. If the phone was sufficiently powerful, you wouldn't lose any performance gains. I'm implicitly defining sufficiently powerful to be however powerful the iPhone would need to be to see no performance drop.

Once we assume the CPU and memory of the iPhone can handle it, doing it that way would be faster since there would be less latency involved.

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