[HN Gopher] The flip phone web: browsing with the original Opera...
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The flip phone web: browsing with the original Opera Mini
Author : protonbob
Score : 85 points
Date : 2025-05-29 15:30 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.spacebar.news)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.spacebar.news)
| lysace wrote:
| This August 10 the service will have been online for 20 years.
| It's certainly the most long-lived service I ever co-created.
| I'll probably even feel a bit sad whenever they shut it down.
|
| The version launched in 2005 did simple line breaking in the
| client. It could only do what we called SSR (small-screen
| rendering), breaking up the site layout into a vertical strip.
|
| With version 4 in 2007 we moved to a model where font metrics are
| calculated/checksummed/uploaded if needed and then the layout
| happens on the servers using the full Presto engine. This enabled
| a full "iPhone-like view" (mobile-friendly web pages were a
| rarity back then - and being able too zoom in/out and pan around
| was exciting stuff). This is basically the protocol that's still
| running.
|
| Someone reverse-engineered the protocol here:
|
| https://github.com/grawity/obml-parser/blob/master/obml.md
|
| (I left about Opera about a decade ago.)
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Nothing about iMode? ABs the fact that EVERYBODY made fun of the
| Japanese that they washed a camera in the phone.
|
| I remember going to Mobile Monday in Tokyo in 2003 or 2005. There
| were so many companies pitching new QR-type codes.
|
| I wanted a Panasonic and NEC flipphone soo bad, but they weren't
| available nor compatible. I did buy one though :)
|
| I remember using opera to save on data indeed.
| burningChrome wrote:
| The 2003 Nokia 3650 had that weird circular keypad on it and
| was one of the first phones to have video capabilities.
|
| Funny story. Had an uber rich client who's eyes lit up when I
| told her the phone could take video. She paid full price for it
| and said she was going to Vegas that weekend and gave me that
| Cheshire Cat smile and a wink.
|
| Totally forgot about her and the exchange. She brought the
| phone back a few weeks later and said the keypad was unbearable
| and wanted to exchanged it for something else. My boss threw it
| back in the box; but told me to reset it so he could resell as
| new. There were a bunch of raunchy photos with her and some
| other guy who wasn't her husband on a private plane. She also
| forgot to delete the two short sex videos she had taken. When I
| laughingly showed my boss, he immediately wanted me to take
| them off and send them to him.
|
| That was 2003 and I suddenly realized that having the ability
| to take pictures and video with a phone was going to be a very
| bad thing.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Let me count the things here I would not confess to today.
| therein wrote:
| I had that phone. The keypad was indeed unbearable. Right
| after I bought it, my friends started getting Nokia 6600. It
| was a major improvement in every way.
|
| 3650's camera was 640x480 and had a noticeable delay after
| taking a photo. It had acceptable shutter speed but if the
| subject was moving, it would be blurry. 6600 was a lot
| better. I think it might have been slightly higher resolution
| as well. 3650's videos were really low frame rate and barely
| acceptable. 6600 had better video but still not great. At
| least usable at that time.
|
| I really hated 3650's keypad. Siemens SX1 also was memorable
| with its weird keypad. [0]
|
| [0] - https://sm.pcmag.com/pcmag_uk/review/s/siemens-
| sx/siemens-sx...
| scrollop wrote:
| Interesting link from this article
|
| https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-opera-browser/
| jsheard wrote:
| > However, Opera's development for the past few years has
| mostly been chasing trends and splitting resources across
| multiple web browsers. The first experiment after the company's
| purchase was Opera Neon, which was introduced in 2017 as a
| concept for new browser design. It was seemingly updated for a
| few months and then quietly dropped.
|
| Speak of the devil, they just re-announced Opera Neon yesterday
| but now it's an "agenic AI browser". They're not beating the
| trend-chaser allegations.
|
| https://blogs.opera.com/news/2025/05/opera-neon-first-ai-age...
| jlarocco wrote:
| Yeah, it's really sad what they did to Opera.
|
| It was such a great alternative, and they killed it, ran the
| company into the ground, and then started doing shitty stuff
| like in that article.
|
| I wish they would have open sourced Presto, but I can't imagine
| there's any hope that will ever happen.
| mmsc wrote:
| Presto source code was leaked years ago.
| jlarocco wrote:
| Nobody's going to waste their time building a browser
| around leaked source code.
| fidotron wrote:
| Opera Mini appeared at a strange time. This is back around when
| Apple had done Webkit just for the Mac (derived from KHTML) and
| Nokia thought it would be cool on S60, and it was.
|
| WAP/WML was a near total flop, although oddly had a second life
| on interactive TV in the UK where Sky funded creation of a WML
| browser in OpenTV to enable faster turnaround of new apps.
| (OpenTV was neither open nor particularly consistent between
| devices, and the normal mode of delivering content via satellite
| was difficult logistically).
|
| As someone else mentioned imode was way more popular, at least in
| Japan. (I happen to have been slightly involved in the relative
| failure of a rollout in France). NTT went to massive lengths to
| get Japanese companies up and running on imode, such that by
| about 2002 huge amounts of ecommerce were being done on it,
| including B2B. I know of major electronics components vendors
| doing >70% of their sales (by value) via mobile Internet in Japan
| by 2005. imode didn't really do well in the 3G transition though,
| and the increased complexity of the phones led to a lot of bad
| software on them, which was the opportunity Apple ultimately
| exploited.
|
| The result of all that is in 2005 J2ME was surprisingly capable,
| but virtually no one was using it, and so Opera Mini was kind of
| by itself for a while. The company that does a lot of transport
| ticketing in the UK had at one point a phenomenal mobile banking
| prototype (that worked) but was told by the banks they simply
| weren't ready for it, and the banks didn't think the customers
| were either, which was actually the truth, and so why they
| pivoted.
| lysace wrote:
| > The result of all that is in 2005 J2ME was surprisingly
| capable, but virtually no one was using it, and so Opera Mini
| was kind of by itself for a while.
|
| Compatibility with J2ME was really fragmented and this was the
| time when there were literally thousands of phone models in the
| market at the same time, so it took a sizeable effort to ship
| something that worked well.
|
| With Opera Mini we had about 5-6 people (developers+QA) working
| on J2ME device compatibility continuously. And a really
| impressive physical device library. I think it had about 2.5k
| devices in the end.
|
| Once you got really popular though, most device manufacturers
| started including compatibility with your app in their shipping
| criterias, so then it suddenly got really easy.
| fidotron wrote:
| By 2005 J2ME fragmentation was nothing like as bad as what
| Android would become, and remains greatly exaggerated. By
| that point the 3650 and T610 were getting to be history, and
| Siemens were on the edge of dropping out.
|
| It was one of those things that was very surmountable if the
| market pull would have been there to overcome it, but there
| wasn't demand because the phone form factors of the time
| sucked for apps and games.
|
| > With Opera Mini we had about 5-6 people (developers+QA)
| working on J2ME device compatibility continuously.
|
| You realize this is tiny? To cover things like Blackberry and
| Brew took significantly more effort than that, and this is
| pre GPU or camera variation being a thing.
| lysace wrote:
| I meant throughout the life span of J2ME, not specifically
| in 2005. We built Opera Mini 1.0 in 8 months with a team
| starting with about 2-3 people, growing to about 10.
|
| > You realize this is tiny?
|
| Well, yes - I remember being happy that the big US
| companies found this to be too much work, leaving the
| market to some scrappy Scandinavians (Opera was based out
| of Oslo, Norway; Opera Mini was based out of a satellite
| office in Linkoping, Sweden.)
|
| I was particularly confused about why Google didn't build a
| J2ME browser app, having acquired Reqwireless (Waterloo,
| Ontario). I believe they had that team build a web-to-wap
| proxy on google.com instead. Speculation: Perhaps Andy
| Rubin/Android killed the (to me) obvious Google J2ME
| browser?
| RandallBrown wrote:
| > This is back around when Apple had done Webkit just for the
| Mac
|
| I would be surprised if they didn't build Webkit with the
| iPhone in mind.
| miki123211 wrote:
| > As someone else mentioned imode was way more popular, at
| least in Japan. (I happen to have been slightly involved in the
| relative failure of a rollout in France).
|
| Do you have any info on what the iMode technical stack was
| like? The information available on the internet (at least in
| English) is scarce.
| fidotron wrote:
| Someone somewhere will have a French copy of the tech specs,
| because Bouygues paid to have the whole lot translated before
| any work could commence.
|
| One oddity of the Japanese setup was NTT essentially ran a
| cloud, of a huge pile of HP-UX servers with Oracle/JVM etc.
| somewhere in Yokohama which was running all the backend. When
| I said NTT went to big efforts to get companies on board this
| is what I mean: they were incredibly proactive about getting
| integrations into this happening, to the point of entirely
| hosting it on site if necessary and essentially doing the
| work themselves for anyone they thought valuable enough. I
| don't believe any version outside Japan ever replicated this,
| and it was the magic ingredient along with persistent data
| connections.
|
| The closest thing the west saw to that in practice was the
| Sidekick, but that never got the level of third party
| support.
|
| It's fairly widely understood that i-mode used CHTML but I'm
| unfamiliar with the lower levels of the networking stack. App
| wise there was Java but not normal J2ME. All I can remember
| that was unique was their scratchpad memory area (which was
| just way too big), and billing APIs!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoJa
| kergonath wrote:
| > I happen to have been slightly involved in the relative
| failure of a rollout in France
|
| Was it with Bouygues? IIRC they were basically the only
| provider to advertise i-mode.
|
| Anyway, i-mode might have been a flop, but for a brief moment
| in time I enjoyed being on the bleeding edge with things like
| Opera Mini on my Sony Ericsson. Those were the days.
| fidotron wrote:
| > Was it with Bouygues?
|
| It was. For reasons that now escape me I was doing billing
| integration work for it.
| jerlam wrote:
| Opera was amazing in the early days of the web, it was one of the
| few programs that I gladly paid money for.
|
| I used to browse without images and CSS (but only one keyboard
| shortcut away) when bandwidth was low and web development was
| amateurish. Opera Mini took another leap forward to move
| rendering off slow smartphones.
|
| Things have changed a lot in 20 years. My smartphone is probably
| faster than most computers of that era. And Opera is a zombie
| company trying to take advantage of its users.
| burningChrome wrote:
| I remember just being new to web development and all the
| developers were so bougie about only using Opera because it was
| adopting the HTML5 standards faster than any other company.
| They were one of the first companies to develop standards for
| video if I remember correctly. They also were the first browser
| to offer ad blocking which was getting really intrusive.
| kstrauser wrote:
| > My smartphone is probably faster than most computers of that
| era.
|
| That's an understatement. With the usual caveats that
| benchmarks lie and all that, here's a pretty fast server I had
| in 2008 or so vs a modern iPhone[0]. The single core scores are
| 430 and 3427 respectively, and multi-core scores are 745 vs
| 8494. The phone wipes the floor with the server on normal
| tasks. On things that use huge amounts of FLOPS like object
| detection, it's just about 100x faster.
|
| In addition, the entire A18 SoC uses around 10W max, vs the
| E8400 burning 65W by itself.
|
| If you want to go back to exactly 20 years ago, there's a
| Pentium 4 vs an iPhone.[1] It had single/multi-core performance
| of 185/216 at 85W (by itself, not including chipset and RAM),
| and the phone runs math stuff around 500x faster.
|
| Yes. Your smartphone is many times faster than most computers
| of that era.
|
| [0]
| https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/12190780?baseli...
|
| [1]
| apitman wrote:
| Good thing Apple and Google hamstring the hardware for us.
| Users can't be trusted with so much power.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| Could you elaborate? I'm still happy with the performance
| of my 12 pro, even with LLMs and SD for instance.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I think they're grousing that we can't sideload arbitrary
| apps onto our phones. There are a couple of reasonable
| defensible view on the matter, neither of which are
| relevant to the subject at hand, and I'm not sure why
| they brought it up.
| westpfelia wrote:
| This is cool. But I was really hopeful I was going to find out
| about a new phone that actually has a keyboard. No reason to
| think that. just hope.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| I've used it recently here's my experience: It's incredible that
| such an old browser still works. Most websites don't load but
| basic browsing is still possible. Even gmail still worked until a
| few years ago.
|
| The browser is only really suitable for reading text such as
| articles etc. A great example is hacker news. Just to prove this
| point i wrote this comment on my old nokia!
|
| The thing about the browser is that it can only load static
| elements. That means no ads autoplay or pop ups. Only the
| necessary text will appear and the page loads relatively fast.
| This, in my opinion makes opera mini a SUPERIOR browsing
| experience to a modern smartphone. I realised how much
| unnecessary junk is usually on the page.
|
| It is totally antiquated, but it's sad how such an obsolete piece
| of technology can be better (in a limited way) to what is used
| nowadays.
| nfriedly wrote:
| I have some good memories of Opera Mini. One time I ended up
| locked out of my house and spent a couple of hours browsing the
| web in Opera Mini on a 2G candybar phone with a ~1.5" screen
| until someone else with a key arrived. It was slow, but not too
| bad.
| srmarm wrote:
| I did my first toilet browsing on a Sony Ericsson K750i on Edge
| network. For forums it worked really well. I suspect this site
| would have worked well on it.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Razr might have been a bit too early for that ?
|
| ( mandatory Razr 2 V9 ad :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJyr6HO617w )
|
| How well did it ran ? More importantly, how expensive would have
| been the data usage in 2005 ? (Would have depended heavily on
| location I guess.)
|
| I only remember starting using it on the Nokia N75/N95, so a
| smartphone already (Symbian OS, slider form, keypad).
|
| By that point (2007-2009) data costs had come down to a (what
| felt cheap at the time) 1024EUR/Go, as well as data speeds : up
| -- though looks like Razr got 3G in 2005 already, so data speeds
| might not have been a bottleneck ? -- so heavy browsing became
| possible.
|
| Though I mostly used it indeed for RSS feeds (especially
| Slashdot). Desktop Opera had a great RSS feed reader too !
|
| ----
|
| And email client. That desktop Opera 12 (2012) is probably still
| the best browser that had ever been made. Meanwhile Firefox only
| got built-in tab groups back in 2025 ! (It lost them in 2016.)
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/11/hands...
|
| (Any browser built on Apple's WebKit or Google's Chromium (like
| the company that now owns the Opera brand, or even Vivaldi, the
| true Opera successor) being of course out of the question,
| especially in 2025.)
| lysace wrote:
| > Razr might have been a bit too early for that ?
|
| Opera Mini worked on the original Razr. Painfully slowly and
| with that giant cheesy font though. And that ZX81-like painful
| keypad.
|
| We spent a fun day chasing down some weird bug in its TCP
| implementation to make it work reliably. I don't remember the
| exact details but the workaround was to wait a few seconds
| before closing the TCP connection after being done sending
| data.
|
| Edit: Heh, found a sorta modern video showing this:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjPZoQ_1kE8&t=834s
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yes, my apologies for the misunderstanding : I have no doubt
| it technically worked (as I had done it myself on the Razr,
| just to check it out), just that it was painful -- and yeah,
| those <<fake>> (?) buttons would have made it even worse.
| iamjackg wrote:
| I have very fond memories of using Opera Mini on my N-Gage and on
| a bunch of later feature phones that only had J2ME support. It
| felt revolutionary at the time, especially since data plans were
| still extremely restrictive.
|
| Wifi on phones was also not quite a thing yet, so I had found an
| application for S60 phones that allowed them to share a
| computer's connection via Bluetooth. The range was extremely
| limited, but enough for me to browse the internet from my bed!
| kccqzy wrote:
| I only remember doing the reverse: when the wireless AP at home
| broke down, I created a Bluetooth PAN to use the cellular
| Internet connection on my computer. Didn't need to install any
| J2ME app. (At that time desktop OSes had basically no
| background process that would use the Internet silently. )
| butz wrote:
| It would be neat to build a proxy that converts modern websites
| to be browsable with browsers like dillo, and removes all
| annoyances along the way. Going a step forward, maybe this
| "proxy" could run on local device and even allow more complicated
| workflows, like doing online shopping and banking?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| That exists:) https://github.com/tenox7/wrp
| takipsizad wrote:
| afaik opera mini uses its own thing for transmitting web
| browser from client to proxy server not just html it's called
| obml i think
| yaky wrote:
| There is http://frogfind.com/ for retro and lightweight
| devices. But all I see for source is the readability module.
| exiguus wrote:
| I remember using Opera Mini during mobile device testing back in
| the day. I didn't know (or remember) that it used a technique to
| render pages on a server before sending them to Mobile. But i
| remember, that i also used it with an emulator on desktop (for
| Palm PDAs).
|
| I was very sad when Opera stopped its development with version 12
| and shut down all its services, including the dev blog and
| bookmark service. Opera was my main browser in the 2000s, and I
| used it for web development, as well as an email client and feed
| reader. Recently, since they have a working email client, I
| started using Opera again, now Vivaldi (CEO is also Jon von
| Tetzchner).
| rs186 wrote:
| Fun fact: Opera Mini was used as a way for Chinese users to get
| around GFW, until the loophole was closed by Opera, and all users
| redirected to a special Chinese version of the app.
| mrweasel wrote:
| The impressive part is that the Opera Mini servers are still
| running. Who even runs them, who maintains the code and fixes
| security issues, the new Opera company?
|
| Seeing Opera switch from Presto and later being sold to a Chinese
| company, which seems hellbent on building a gamer browser and
| apparently now an AI browser is such a lose of everyone. Sure
| Opera and Presto was closed source, but that was in some sense
| the brilliant part. We had four major browser engines, three of
| them really good, three cross platform (of of which was REALLY
| cross platform), two open source, two closed source. There was
| actual choice.
|
| The problem of cause was that Opera could not reasonably keep up
| with Googles, neither could Microsoft, but Opera had nothing else
| that could underwrite their browser development. It's really sad,
| because Opera was a really good browser. Now it's just another
| Chrome skin.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > The impressive part is that the Opera Mini servers are still
| running. Who even runs them, who maintains the code and fixes
| security issues, the new Opera company?
|
| I'd guess nobody, and they're one hardware crash, security
| compromise, etc. away from being turned off.
| lysace wrote:
| Last time I heard the service was still actively maintained. I
| think it's still a thing in Africa, somehow.
| lamer3 wrote:
| It was very well optimised
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Anyone remember WAP browsing on the Cybiko?
| panstromek wrote:
| I wrote a nostalgic post on opera mini few weeks ago
| (https://yoyo-code.com/love-letter-to-opera-mini/) and somebody
| linked a project that does similar architecture but running
| chrome in the cloud instead, to enable feature phones to use the
| internet - https://developer.cloudfone.com/
|
| Operators in India and some other countries sell phones where
| this is pre-installed and websites have to be specially adjusted
| for keyboard input and low resolution. It's pretty interesting, I
| want to try it out, they just don't sell those phones here.
| lysace wrote:
| > Today I'm glad I don't have to use Opera Mini anymore, and as
| a programmer, I hope that my software will at some point have
| such a strong positive impact on somebody's live as Opera Mini
| had on mine.
|
| That was so nice to read! We were a small team and we _really_
| cared about making it as nice to use as possible.
|
| To be perfectly honest though, we kind of built it for
| ourselves. Mobile data was really expensive, and we were
| addicted to the web. I have a vague memory of mobile data
| pricing being like 2 USD/MB over 2G in Sweden when we started
| building it (2004). Sounds insane now. That progress bar
| clearly showing how many kilobytes of data you were using was a
| conscious design decision. There was real money at stake for
| the user.
| aspizu wrote:
| I found my old j2me phone lying around, tried using it as a daily
| driver for a while. wanted to browse geminispace so wrote a j2me
| gemini browser. maybe I should write a blog about my experience.
| yaky wrote:
| That would be fun to read. Did you get the gemini browser to
| work? AFAIK getting TLS working on old devices could be
| difficult.
| polar wrote:
| A lot of phones from that era (and before) used to use the
| NetFront browser.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetFront
| grishka wrote:
| I tested an older version of Opera Mini, iirc 4.x, on an actual
| 00s phone (we still have 2G networks with no plans to shut them
| down) out of curiosity several months ago, and to my great
| surprise, it worked too. Exactly like it did back in 2007. And
| yes, there were those interstitial ads too. _Those_ definitely
| weren 't a thing in 2007.
| lxgr wrote:
| Opera Mini was (or rather is - the servers are still up!) the
| best.
|
| My 100 MB/month plan on an early Symbian smartphone went
| incredibly far with it, and the browsing experience was usually
| better than on both the integrated WebKit browser and Opera
| Mobile - so much so that I actually ended up switching back to a
| feature phone with J2ME.
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(page generated 2025-05-29 23:00 UTC)