Opera Next–the auto-updating test edition of the next major version of the Norwegian Web browser–is out in a new version, 11.50. It has a clever addition to Speed Dial, the page of thumbnail links to favorite sites which has been widely imitated since Opera invented it: extensions. Rather than just depicting shrunken versions of sites you’ve saved, Speed Dial can now include widgety little applications, such as the weather one in the lower left-hand corner of the screen above.

Like most browser innovations, Speed Dial extensions will only be interesting if they gets embraced by developers, who’ll need to build them in large quantities. And it’ll be be most interesting if it turns into a standard, so that users of all browsers get to enjoy it, too. But if you like checking out nifty new Web concepts, it’s worth a peek right now. As is Opera in general–every time I revisit this browser, I wonder why it’s not more popular. (According to Google Analytics, only one percent of you use it to visit Technologizer.)

Thirteen months after Opera’s Opera Mini browser became the first and only full-fledged Web browser that Apple allows to compete with Safari on the iPhone, it’s back in version 6.0 for iOS–and the big news is that the new version is optimized for the iPad as well as the iPhone.

As before, Mini’s emphasis is on speed: it caches and compresses pages on the server side, so they pop into place really quickly on the device. It also lets you opt for lower-quality images (or no images at all)  to speed things even further, and has a mode that strips out fancy formatting. It also tends to display the mobile-friendly versions of sites when available–the New York Times, TIME, and CNN, for instance, all show up in the text-heavy editions tailored for phones rather than the full-blown ones. (That looks a little odd on the iPad’s nice big screen.)

The new version of the browser has a higher level of polish than the original one: panning and zooming around is much smoother, and it now supports the iPhone 4′s high-res “retina” screen. For the most part, it does a nice job of feeling like an iOS app while simultaneously picking up on Opera elements such as showing thumbnails of the pages open in tabs. And it’s got some features that Safari lacks, such as the ability to share pages on Twitter and Facebook. One gripe: it has copy-and-paste, but the copying interface is non-standard and nowhere near as well thought-out as Apple’s version.

I’m not sure how many people who aren’t either raving Opera fans or starved for bandwidth while opt for Opera Mini as their primary iOS browser over Safari. But I’m glad that it exists, and that the Opera folks continue to beef it up. (Me, I use Atomic Web Browser–which adds more desktop-like features to Safari’s rendering engine–about seventy percent of the time on both the iPhone and the iPad.)

At this week’s Web 2.0 conference in New York, John Gruber of blog Daring Fireball tried to illustrate app supremacy by showing the absurdity of an iPad screen with only the Safari Web browser icon.

Earlier in the day, a different obituary emerged, not surprisingly, at a panel called “What to Expect from Browsers.” It came up in a discussion about HTML5, the emerging bundle of standards that allow the browser to essentially run applications from Web pages – as so-called “Web apps.” Håkon Wium Lie of Opera Software predicted that HTML5 would reclaim mobiles. “Apps? I think that’s going to be on the Web,” he said.

Microsoft, meanwhile, presents a Third Way by sucking the Web into its upcoming Windows Phone 7 operating system. An example: Like with Android, Phone 7 shows Facebook updates in the address book’s contact entries. But you can also comment on those updates right in the address book, without getting booted to a Facebook app. Likewise, you can represent contacts on the home screen with icons that show their latest photo posts in real time. “So you don’t have to dive into the app,” said Microsoft designer Paula Guntaur. “You can actually get that information at the very first level.”

Reality will likely be a mishmash of these visions. iPhones, iPods and iPads won’t drop the Safari browser. Nor will Microsoft’s vision dominate, even according to Microsoft. Paula Guntaur explained that Phone 7 simply provides a peek into the Web and basic functions like send little messages to Facebook. Microsoft is also scrambling for developers to fill out an app store.

The dictions between Web and app are nuanced. Daring Fireball’s Gruber claims that the Web, rather than separate from the iPhone’s iOS, is part of it, since iOS apps use Web-based services. He showed a Venn diagram with the Web as a big circle
within the bigger circle of iOS.

Which circles swallow which is a matter of semantic noodling. But Gruber’s main point – that Web, app, and OS blur together – describes the reality. “How could you say that Twitter, even though it’s running in an app, how can you say it’s not [also] a Web app?” he asked. “Just because it’s not written in HTML [i.e. for the browser], I say that doesn’t mean it’s not a Web app.”

Wonder how Apple (not to mention Adobe) would feel about that?

I figured the app would make it because…well, I couldn’t think of a reason why it wouldn’t. Apple isn’t involved in epic battle with Opera (unlike, say, Google). It can be pretty confident that Safari will remain by far the iPhone’s dominant browser even if Opera Mini does quite well. And hey, making trouble for browser companies that wish to run on your operating system is demonstrably bad juju.

Opera Mini’s signature feature is the way it compresses Web pages on the server side, then sends the browser a slimmed-down version to speed things up. So far, I’ve only tried the browser in the comfort of my own home. I used it on 3G and Wi-Fi, and it felt reasonably snappy but not outrageously more so than Apple’s Safari. I then put my phone into 2G mode, and Mini still did quite well–but it only seemed a bit swifter than Safari.

I happen to live in an area blessed with very solid AT&T coverage; in areas with shakier service, it’s possible that Mini might feel more strikingly fast.

Mini is in no way a Safari-killer. Its page rendering is much less attractive and desktop-like than Safari’s, and sometimes it’s just plain wrong. (Now that Mini is on the App Store, I hope that Opera continues to polish it up,) Like Safari, it doesn’t do Flash; unlike Safari, it also can’t play YouTube videos. Certain things about it feel a tad foreign on the iPhone, like its non-standard interface for copying text.

But though Opera Mini isn’t without its downsides, it has a number of attractive features which Safari doesn’t. One of them is one I use constantly on desktop browsers: the ability to search for text within a Web page. Its approach to juggling multiple pages feels more like tabbed browsing; it has a full-screen mode; it can save pages for offline reading; and it works with Opera Link, which lets you sync bookmarks among multiple copies of Opera. Overall, it feels like a slightly more feature-rich alternative to Safari, not a stripped-down wannabee.

In other words, it’s possible that some people will prefer Mini to Safari–or it least find it worth using on a part-time basis. Isn’t nice that they’ll get to make that decision?

Herewith, a few screen images–if you try the browser out, let us know what you think,

vvv

The company touts its server-side compression technology as making Opera Mini up to six times faster than Apple’s Mobile Safari. When I tried Mini on the iPhone last week at the South by Southwest conference, I didn’t see that speed boost–but an Opera representative recently told me that Mini was misconfigured at SxSW. And I was impressed with the browser in other ways.

Will Apple approve Mini? Assuming that it follows the iPhone developer agreement and doesn’t involve security risks, I think it would be a horrible mistake if it didn’t. Safari is going to be the iPhone’s dominant browser no matter what, and spiking Mini would resurrect Google Voice-like concerns that Apple is unwilling to permit competitors to build iPhone apps that rational people might prefer to Apple’s own wares.

It’ll be good for iPhone owners, Opera, Apple, and the American way if Apple approves Mini without delay. And I’m in an optimistic mood. So I’m hereby predicting that it’ll show up on the App Store within the next couple of weeks.

On every platform it runs on, Opera Mini’s signature feature is that it’s speedy, thanks to server-side compression that crunches Web pages down before they get sent to the browser. In my extremely informal experiments here at SXSW, Mini didn’t feel particularly zippy. (Actually, it loaded the New York Times’ home page more slowly than Mobile Safari did.) But it may not have been a real-world test of how it’ll perform when Apple approves it (please!) and it shows up on the App Store: An Opera representative told me that the compression is still going on via servers in far-away Norway, which would tend to bog things down.

Whatever its performance turns out to be like, Opera Mini has some features that might lead some folks to opt for it over Safari, at least on a part-time basis. It’s got Opera’s Speed Dial feature, which lets you get to favorite Web sites with one tap. It uses Opera Link to synchronize bookmarks with other copies of Opera on different devices.  It lets you search for text within the current page, a pretty basic feature which Safari lacks.

On the other hand, Mini doesn’t try to match the desktop-like accuracy with which Safari renders Web pages: It just displays a rough approximation (albeit an acceptable one, at least on the pages I visited). And I don’t think it offers Safari’s ability to play YouTube videos.

Once Opera submits Mini for approval, Apple’s response will be one of the bigger litmus tests in iPhone history to date. Apple has been known to reject apps on the grounds that they duplicate existing iPhone functionality or might confuse users. But iPhone owners deserve to be treated like grownups who are smart enough to try multiple browsers before settling on one if they so choose. Just as they get to do on Android and just about every other platform, mobile or otherwise.

By submitting Opera Mini, Opera will be doing iPhone owners a favor. Heck, it’ll even do Apple a favor, by giving it a golden opportunity to do the right thing.

In my brief time with Mini 5 so far on a Verizon Droid, it felt fast but not strikingly faster than the standard Android browser (an experience which PCMag.com’s Sean Ludwig also encountered). Formatting is never as faithful as in the stock browser, and some of the sites I visited with the beta looked just plain wonky. But on the plus side, Mini let me get into one Web site–the back-end part of WordPress.com I use to update Technologizer–which I haven’t been able to access with the bundled Android browser.

Worth a look if you’re a browser buff with an Android phone (and I’m glad that Android users have the option of choosing Mini–here’s hoping that iPhone owners get to choose, too).