The flip phone web: browsing with the original Opera Mini

Summary

Opera Mini was first released in 2005 as a web browser for mobile phones, with the ability to load full websites by sending most of the work to an external server. It was a massive hit, but it started to fade out of relevance once smartphones entered mainstream use.Opera Mini still exists today as a web browser for iPhone and Android—it's now just a tweaked version of the regular Opera mobile browser, and you shouldn't use Opera browsers. However, the original Java ME-based version is still functional, and you can even use it on modern computers.How Opera Mini worksIn the 1990s and 2000s, most mobile phones didn't have the processing power to load full desktop websites. Instead, an alternative Wireless Application Protocol (WAP, but not that WAP) was created for simple websites that could work over a 1G/2G connection on a typical mobile phone. For example, the BBC had a regular website for users on desktop computers, and a simpler WAP site for users on mobile phones and PDAs. The WAP versions of websites usually didn't have all the functionality and pages as the regular sites.Opera Mini used a clever workaround when it arrived in 2005. When you loaded a website in the browser, the request was sent to one of Opera's cloud servers, which rendered the page and sent the result back to the phone. Images and other data were also compressed along the way to minimize cellular data usage.Here's part of the initial pitch for Opera Mini, with 'operators' referring to mobile network carriers:Because Opera Mini™ enables Web access on low- and mid-tier phones, operators can now dramatically increase the average revenue per user (ARPU) across their entire customer base by stimulating the usage of compelling mobile Web services. Opera offers full customization of Opera Mini™ to companies, for example operators, broadcasters, mobile content providers and the Internet industry, that would like to include their own version of Opera Mini™ as part of their mobile content offerings.The f...