Opera, the software maker, are planning to showcase Opera Mini for iPhone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week.

This move is seen as highly controversial as Apple doesn’t allow any software to be approved that rivals the iPhones “core functionality”. Seen as the iPhone already uses the Safari mobile browser it means that Opera wouldn’t be approved.

Perhaps Opera are hoping the software proves so popular they are left with no choice, but nonetheless it’s a risky and forceful move.

Opera Mini is the world’s most popular mobile browser with 25 per cent market share, which makes it slightly more popular than Apples Safari browser.

Opera Mini brings significant speed improvements due to its unique compression technique. All images and text are first compressed on Operas server before being displayed on your iPhone. This means that there is less data to download improving the speed that images and text loads and also means you receive less data, which costs less.

Apparently, Opera Mini is 6 times faster than Safari which will make it desirable to end users and it’ll be interesting to see where this development ends.