Opera’s newly launched Opera Mini browser for the iPhone has been downloaded more than one million times in its first full day of worldwide availability. The browser serves as an alternative to Apple’s own Safari web browser. Opera Mini is downloaded 1 million times but does it provide security? Let’s discuss here. I hope you know the basic that Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers are different. Unless you have a Windows Mobile or Symbian/S60 phone, Opera Mobile is not available for you to download to your phone. Let’s look at the difference between Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers,

” In Opera Mini, the Opera Presto browser engine is located on a server. In Opera Mobile, it is installed on your phone.
When you enter a Web address in Opera Mobile, the Web page is fetched directly from the Web server to your phone. However, the Opera Mini client sends a request to the Opera Mini server, which downloads the page from the Internet. The server then trans-codes the page before it is forwarded to the client in a lightweight mark-up language designed specifically for this purpose.”
(Source: Opera Mini blog)

Although Opera claims that it doesn’t store any users’ private information, it’s true that Opera Mini can’t provide full end-to-end encryption. Opera Mini uses a trans-coder server to translate HTML/CSS/JavaScript into a more compact format. It will also shrink any images to fit the screen of your handset. This translation step makes Opera Mini fast, small and also very easy to use. To be able to do this translation, the Opera Mini server needs to have access to the unencrypted version of the Web page. That means, Opera Mini never communicates with any site directly, only through Opera proxy servers that first go to that URL, get a page, recompile it into its own markup language, compress and send it back to the mobile client that alone can understand it. Therefore, no end-to-end encryption between the client and the remote Web server is possible.

Extracted from Opera’s FAQ:

Q: Is there any end-to-end security between my handset and — for example — paypal.com or my bank?
A: No. If you need full end-to-end encryption, you should use a full Web browser such as Opera Mobile.

It’s crystal clear that Opera Mini is not the safest bet. So what, enjoy the flexibility of Opera Mini for other surfing experiences My suggestion is that use Opera Mini with caution while dealing with secured web pages. (URLs begin with “https://” and use port 443 by default) It’s safe to surf using other versions from Opera like Opera Mobile on your handset or Opera browser on your desktop / laptop. Enjoy your surfing. Trust me, Opera is the world’s most secure browser Try it now. Download Opera.