I used to be Opera-exclusive a few years ago, before the big Firefox craze and before Google Chrome was even thought of. I'm a Chrome fanboy on both PC and Mac now, but for my iPad - Opera Mini 6 rocks the house. I downloaded it this morning and compared to Safari, it just rocks. Opera Mini iPhone App made a pretty amazing entrance to the App Store in April last year; grabbing 1 million downloads in its first day.

However, they just released Opera Mini 6 for iOS and this morning I tried it before driving to my day job and it is simply amazing. I had 5 minutes with it and my initial impressions left me wanting to use it more. Pages seemed to load up at least twice as fast as the stock browser and the interface feels so much more intuitive. Opera Software says the browser features up to 90-percent compression of data traffic for faster browsing, improved display and a refreshed user interface to accommodate for various screen sizes.

Another bonus? Well, it's free!