Opera Mini, the worlds most popular mobile Web browser, was submitted to Apple App store more than 16 days ago and theres still no news from Apple whether Opera Mini will be accepted or not. According to iPhone Dev Center 95% of new Apps are reviewed in the last 7 days, which makes Opera Mini a special case where Apple needs more than double their average review time to come up with a decision.

Opera made a compelling case for Opera Mini on iPhone by demonstrating how Opera is six times faster than Safari on iPhone and uses less bandwidth by compressing 90% of the data sent to your mobile device. Apple has a history of not approving apps that duplicate core functionality of the iPhone but is some special cases Apple breaks its own rules. Another possibility that Opera Mini might be rejected is the fact that Opera doesnt use webkit as their rendering engine which all third party browsers are required to use in order to be accepted. (There is a possibility that Chrome might me ported to iPhone because it also relies on Webkit rendering engine.)

Opera using webkit would nullify the whole point of Opera Minis selling point that it is faster than Safari. Although Opera Minis beautiful and intuitive UI is compelling enough reason, it is highly unlike that Opera will rewrite their browser so that it can use webkit rendering engine. Specially now that Opera did a massive amount of performance improvements to its new rendering engine Presto and new JavaScript engine Carakan, which is currently the fastest JavaScript engine around according to Sunspider JavaScript Benchmark.

Whatever decision comes from Apple App review it will have an impact on the possibility of other non-webkit browsers being ported to iPhone OS. As for Opera, they continues to lead the way with browser innovations.