this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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They did some awesome browsers back in the early 2000s. I couldn't think about browsing the web without Opera Mini back then.
And despite being designed to run on potatoes with a 2G connection it somehow felt just as smooth as modern mobile browsers (at least as I remember it). It's crazy how well it worked considering the hardware and network limitations of the time.
Didn't opera cache images on their server and feed you a lower res version instead of what the website had? Granted with the limited bandwidth available back then, that was fine but now I don't think many people would want that.
Exactly this. Lower resolution and added compression. You could click to view full version if needed, but this was a feature as it meant faster loading and a small fraction of the data usage.
In Opera Mini, yes. They also had a less popular but nearly identical browser, Opera Mobile, which didn't do the proxying and compression. I had an unlimited data plan back then, so I always used Mobile. The performance was great even without compression.
I remember an ex-girlfriend daily driving it on her phone for all kinds of communications, so maybe this is why she preferred it, I never wondered why, I was very happy with my Linux machine and I barely used my mobile phone at those times anyway.
Amazing piece of software. Reliable on the server side, agile and full of features on the mobile side. And they even made sure that sites like Twitter and Facebook could be used in the browser. What a pity the Opera branding ended like this.