Opera Software on Tuesday announced that it is submitting its Opera Mini Web browser to Apple for use on the iPhone.

The Norwegian company boasts that Opera is the most-used browser on mobile devices; it offers a version of the software for Windows Mobile phones, Google Android and the Nintendo DS game system.

The Opera team said they are confident their new browser will be approved for the iPhone, but the final say is still up to the gatekeepers at Apple who are known to block applications in the iTunes store for any number of random reasons.

Last week I had a chance to sit down with Opera’s co-founder, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, to see an early version of the new iPhone software. The new browser loaded pages extremely quickly, as you can see in the video below, and manages to integrate some unique features that are currently available in its desktop browser. Some of the highlights include unlimited tabbed browsing and the ability to search the content of a Web page — an important feature that is currently unavailable on the Safari mobile browser made by Apple.

The software was missing an important feature on the iPhone: the ability to resize a page by pinching a page with both fingers.  Mr. Tetzchner said this could be added to the software with a later update.

The Opera browser loads Web pages rapidly by using a technology called server-side rendering, which compresses most aspects of a Web site on a server, sometimes reducing the load time of 90 percent of a Web page, before sending the data along to a phone’s browser.

Mr. Tetzchner pitched the new Opera browser as a way to reduce roaming charges when traveling.

Opera Software says its mission is to make a browser for any computer and mobile phone.

Remember how Google Chrome’s market share grew last month, but Firefox and Internet Explorer’s shares slipped downward ever-so-slightly? That trend continued in February, according to web analytics company Net Applications. This time, however, Chrome was the only browser to grow at all (Safari moved up a little bit in January, but not so this time around).

Chrome Chrome grew from 5.22% to 5.61% (0.39%) over the course of February. Internet Explorer Internet Explorer shrunk from 62.12% to 61.58% (0.54%), FirefoxFirefox from 24.43% to 24.23% (0.2%), Safari from 4.53% to 4.45% (0.08%) and Opera from 2.38% to 2.35% (0.03%).

Chrome’s adoption is (unsurprisingly) moving faster among web and tech enthusiasts.

While 14.8% among enthusiasts and 5.22% among the general population might not seem like much, it’s actually very impressive progress for a new browser. Chrome passed Safari to become the third most popular desktop browser in the world in December.

Net Applications also found that the archaic Internet Explorer 6 browser version declined another 0.24%. We’ve been saying “IE6 must die” for months now, and it looks like we’re slowly getting our wish. Expect the decline to speed up this month when YouTube drops its support.