The client was actually even simpler than that, it was just clicks. Doing anything else wasn't practical with the average latency back then. The rest was done

The client was actually even simpler than that, it was just clicks. Doing anything else wasn't practical with the average latency back then. The rest was done on the serverside using the old Opera Presto core - which scaled very economically, since it had gone through a lot of memory optimization efforts when it was ported to early smartphones/japanese weirdphones. We needed to keep the users's browser "tabs"/windows around until the next click, potentially a few minutes away, so memory usage was a key economical concern at the time. I ran the product/development team from early on until 2014. Glad you liked it. Opera Mini peaked at about 150M monthly active users in like 2012-2013 or so. Since then I'm sure it's been a steady decline. If I were to guess right now, I'd say they new Chinese owners maybe will keep it alive for another 5-7 years, but who knows, they seem to be really focusing on Africa.