Choose Opera

Remember last week's article in the New York Times "Bits" blog? It stirred up discussion all over the tubes and the retelling of the story has created "an odd snowball of misunderstanding".

The author, Saul Hansell, had asked Jon S. von Tetzchner (Opera’s CEO) about the iPhone, after he mentioned how the Opera Mini browser was popular on other smartphones. It came out after that Opera had started developing an iPhone version, but didn’t pursue it because Apple doesn’t allow products on the iPhone that compete with its own software — in this case, the Safari browser. Well, the article stated that, figuring it would tell iPhone owners what they really wanted to know: They are not going to be able to use Opera Mini.

This caused many interesting conclusions and discussions.

According to the article, the development of Opera Mini for the iPhone had been more of an "internal project", who had pursued Jon for clarification on the matter and there had never been submitted a fully working version of Opera Mini to the iPhone App Store because of the prohibitve license. Development of Opera Mini for the iPhone had been put to a hault.

Check the source for more information.