The flip phone web: browsing with the original Opera Mini | Hacker News Reader

The flip phone web: browsing with the original Opera Mini

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123 pointsprotonbob76 comments

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.)

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.

> 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.

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.

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 Linköping, 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?

5 to 6 people managed to make an app compatible across 2,500 different devices models at a time when there was practically no hardware standardization, and you say that was a hard thing?

I will say though, thank you for your work on it. It was an awesome product back in the day, I was incredibly grateful.

> 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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

> Was it with Bouygues?

It was. For reasons that now escape me I was doing billing integration work for it.

> The result of all that is in 2005 J2ME was surprisingly capable

On the contrary, J2ME was nearly useless without vendor-specific extensions. And the quality of implementations varied quite a bit.

Another example of a really well-done J2ME app was Google Maps. It had GPS and street view support at the same time as iPhone only did tower location and Google wouldn't license them Street View.

With a high-end Sony Ericsson feature phone, I could multitask(!) between Opera Mini, a J2ME twitter client, IRC client, train timetable app, Google Maps, etc better than a Symbian S60 smartphone could (and iPhone of course couldn't multitask at all) https://kalleboo.com/linked/se_j2me_multitask.jpg

I was there dude, I experienced that same thing. Too many people were unaware of what was available at the time.

IIRC the S60 multitasking was pretty decent. Holding the swishy app button seemed to pull up a list of running apps.

> WAP/WML was a near total flop

Not quite, WAP evolved into WAP 2.0 and WML was replaced with xHTML. For a long period of time WAP 2.0 was the only standard while mobile development evolved. Even as HTML support grew in the mobile space, there was a very solid duration of time where WAP 2.0 was the most supported across the majority of devices and browsers (in the mobile space). And FWIW, I wouldn’t consider WML a flop, because that was the only mobile standard supported on most phones before the iPhone.

O2 in Ireland went relatively big into imode and it actually had decent uptick among local stuff. But then GPRS came about and phones started shipping sort of functional J2ME browsers that could do the "real web" and that was that.

Opera Mini also was a big leap up in capabilities compared to the Sony Ericsson built in browse I was using on the k750i. Both in terms of compatibility and also the compressing reverse proxy stuff they did when data was being charged per megabyte.

Symbian/J2ME was doing perfectly fine in Europe during 2005, source ex-Nokia over here, 2004 - 2010.

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!

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. )

Was going to to say I’m sure they had WiFi, but of course only my N95 did - the 7650 before it didn’t.

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.

> 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.

in like 2005, one could get an unlimited data add-on to an AT&T dumb phone for something like $15/mo. If you managed to get a 3G dumb phone, you'd get a 3G-enabled SIM card.

Just take the SIM and pop it in whatever GSM device supporting the right frequencies and boom cheap unlimited data. It seemed like as long as you didn't use a device AT&T sold they never noticed it wasn't your cheap dumb phone.

It was tricky buying Euro phones. They'd mostly work but usually didn't support the more widespread lower frequencies for AT&T (was it 850 or 900MHz? I don't quite remember). Usually the higher frequencies were well supported like 1900MHz and 2100MHz, but those were pretty hit and miss on coverage and would often die once you went inside a big building.

I wrote an article comparing Cloud Phone and Opera Mini. It’s impressive what Opera Mini enabled, given it’s been frozen in time for roughly a decade. You’d think with SSR, more websites could support it. Despite coming preinstalled on hundreds of millions of phones, it doesn’t represent proportional traffic since navigating on these devices is so difficult

https://developer.cloudfone.com/blog/cloud-phone-vs.-opera-m...

Disclaimer: I work at CloudMosa, the company that makes Cloud Phone

I've just started reading that link so I apologize if this is redundant, but would you elaborate some? What sorts of considerations / limitations exist? What would allow an app/site to run better on this platform?

TLDR-Cloud Phone is actively developed and newer, while Opera Mini is outdated and hasn’t received a major update in many years

There are two components to a remote browser like Cloud Phone or Opera Mini: the thin client that runs on device, and the server that performs remote transcoding and rendering

Opera Mini uses servers with the Presto rendering engine that hasn’t been updated in over 10 years. It’s officially discontinued, and not used by any modern Opera browser for desktop. Opera Mini is also intentionally limited to reduce potential for abuse, since it’s a general purpose web browser. Abuse often looks like websites taking advantage of servers to perform expensive computation, like crypto mining. The Opera Mini Native client also hasn’t been updated in 5 years. It doesn’t support media playback (audio or video streaming), or asynchronous JavaScript execution

Cloud Phone is much newer, actively developed, and only allows published “widgets” to be accessed. Because widgets must be approved, the potential for abuse is much lower. It uses Chromium (currently v128), and supports many more modern Web APIs and asynchronous execution. SPAs and JS-heavy websites will work well on Cloud Phone, but probably don’t work at all on Opera Mini. Finally, the Cloud Phone client offers more capabilities including multimedia playback, access to the camera/ microphone, and other Web APIs like vibration and soon notifications and badging

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.

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.

> 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]

Good thing Apple and Google hamstring the hardware for us. Users can't be trusted with so much power.

Could you elaborate? I’m still happy with the performance of my 12 pro, even with LLMs and SD for instance.

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.

It essentially boils down to we don't have control over what software can run on these devices, so the extent to which we can harness the hardware is limited to what the OS vendors decide, and they make lots of terrible decisions.

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).

A similar but "data leaky". one was UC browser. These two were constantly compared back in the day, their entire selling point was faster downloads over opera mini. I remember doing speed tests with both on my old nokia and Samsung feature phones on 2g networks. I'm extremely grateful these browsers exist otherwise I wouldn't have been browsing zdnet, old techradar, w3schools, phpeasystep, betanews etc. while I was 12. They got me into the world of tech and now I am working in it.

Opera mini did support video playback on some phones especially on YouTube. It opens the phone's inbuilt video player with an RTSP link to the 3gp version of the video. I guess it stopped working when YouTube removed RTSP? Oh that brings a lot of memories about real player which was also available on j2me as well as pc.

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.

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.

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.

My memories are of looking up stuff at the bar and grill in my college town.

It could also browse an early iteration of the full desktop web Facebook UI, at a time when they had no mobile app.

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.

That would be fun to read. Did you get the gemini browser to work? AFAIK getting TLS working on old devices could be difficult.

Interesting link from this article

https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-opera-browser/

> 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...

"Jenkins! Get in here!"

"Yes boss?"..

"I just had lunch with Roberts, and he said they're putting this AI thing into their software! Make sute ours has some of that"

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.

Presto source code was leaked years ago.

Nobody's going to waste their time building a browser around leaked source code.

I don't think anybody will build a browser over the "released" source code either, if it was officially opensourced by Opera. There were some people from CIS countries doing something with that leaked code, not sure if they still provide updates for it though. There's also https://github.com/PrestoXen/openopera-patches

fd: i used to work for the big O

Yeah, but who can say. It happened with Netscape -> Firefox, so you never know.

Just maintaining the code would be difficult enough, and Opera not giving their blessing adds a huge hurdle. No mainstream Linux distro will distribute a blatantly leaked project, and it's definitely not going in any app store.

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.

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.

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.

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) 1024€/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.)

> 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

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.

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.

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.

Let me count the things here I would not confess to today.

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...

When I was at Nokia around that time they were giving out the weird keypad phone for free to all employees it was really terrible, I guess they had an oversupply as the result of people not liking them

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?

That exists:) https://github.com/tenox7/wrp

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

There is http://frogfind.com/ for retro and lightweight devices. But all I see for source is the readability module.

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.

> 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.

Last time I heard the service was still actively maintained. I think it's still a thing in Africa, somehow.

Opera used to regularly release a very interesting "state of the mobile web" report based on trends they could follow closely by operating all the mandatory proxy servers for Opera Mini.

At a first glance, I can only find the 2019 version [1], but as far as I remember they used to publish these every few months.

[1] https://press.opera.com/2019/06/11/opera-presents-the-state-...

A lot of phones from that era (and before) used to use the NetFront browser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetFront

NetFront! That's the same. I was about to write a comment about it upthread but the only name I remembered was NetSurf which is a different browser so assumed I must have been misremembering.

I had Opera Mini on my iPod 2G and it is still the best mobile browser I have used. Samsung Internet is the only one that comes close in terms of UX.

I still remember this. In China, people had used its ability to bypass the Great Firewall to access websites that were blocked by the CCP gov.

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.

It was very well optimised

Anyone remember WAP browsing on the Cybiko?

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