throwaway04324 a year ago

I think Opera Mini did much more than compression.

I seem to remember them actually rewriting (rendering?) the web page server side, and then sending an optimized mobile friendly version to make it more readable for pages that were originally designed for desktop.

It worked great on my phone and I even used it when the phones were more cabable, because web pages looked better and it saved a lot of bandwidth.

Reply View 2 replies
  • lxgr a year ago

    They rendered the site server-side (including JavaScript execution for a couple of seconds and all) and then sent the rendered page in some binary markup language to the client, with images heavily compressed.

    I actually still sometimes use it on iOS! The app is no longer available in most (all?) App Store regions, but I still have it on my account and can redownload it. The servers seem to still be there!

    Reply View 1 reply
    • [removed] a year ago
      [deleted]
      Reply View 0 replies
usr1106 a year ago

No, it was another company, I don't think a well-known name.

Opera Mini still works today on S60 phones from 2006ish. I regularly see web server log entries from a relative on my private server. But I believe it's a native Symbian app (.sis) not a Midlet. (I have working phones, but I don't have Opera Mini, so I cannot verify)

Reply View 2 replies
  • lysace a year ago

    Perhaps Reqwireless? Acquihired by Google to work on the WAP dead-end iirc, when then they were figuring out how to deal with mobile.

    Reply View 1 reply
    • usr1106 a year ago

      Reqwireless I have certainly heard. Don't remember in which context. If you tell me they had this "browser frontend" midlet, it's probably the one I used. 2002ish I would guess.

      Reply View 0 replies
dbtablesorrows a year ago

IIRC, other browsers (the chinese UC browser and Nokia's OVI browser) had compression too. But opera was most popular (and perhaps most mature as well).

Reply View 2 replies
  • dfox a year ago

    Compression is inherent feture of WAP and some WAP browsers could use the WAP infrastructure to transfer not only WML, but also well-formed XHTML.

    Reply View 1 reply
    • lxgr a year ago

      Opera Mini went way beyond just compression. It effectively rendered the website server-side and then sent optimized markup to the client (so it's much closer to "print site to SVG" on the server than "Content-encoding: gzip").

      Reply View 0 replies
71bw a year ago

It still does! Ancient versions still work absolutely fine on old phones.

Reply View 0 replies