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(russellbeattie... I recognize that name... small world. Sorry for digressing. Russell: I've got to thank you for https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/1008770 ht

by tpmx 3y ago

(russellbeattie... I recognize that name... small world. Sorry for digressing. Russell: I've got to thank you for https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/1008770 https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/1008770. We all felt so proud after reading that review! Finally someone who got it. I was the person who led the product design/engineering effort during its first decade.)

codetrotter 3y ago
The Opera Mini browser was amazing. Did any of the people that worked on it end up working on anything open source making use of the same ideas? I’m dreaming of having an open source backend that I could run myself on my server, and that would similarly download and compress pages and then send a representation of the page that can be displayed on my iPhone without the app running any JS or anything. Greater security, and also it would make me able to browse even in bad coverage areas where currently all that happens is I wait an eternity for things to try to load and they just time out. Basically, I wish there was an open source backend and app that behaved like Opera Mini used to.
- tpmx 3y ago
  (Not that I'm aware of.) Web pages don't really work without in-page/dynamic javascript any longer. On the other hand it's now cheaper than ever to just have a full-blown webkit instance in the cloud and just sync/stream the dom tree paints to the client. A bunch of products do that, I think. Back then we had a moat because a) Opera's Presto used so much less memory than Webkit - after having gone through so many painful memory optimization efforts, particularly with Japanese mobile browser deliveries, but also with Symbian. b) We figured out a way of making 90% of the web javascript work be keeping "tabs" around on the server for a few minutes and then just replaying carefully selected input events and capturing the output, with some kinda clever heuristics. That combined with the low memory usage did it. Webkit used like 10x more memory per tab/window back then, iirc. And RAM was expensive.
OJFord 3y ago
To get even more meta, isn't it quite incredible that 17y later not only does the blog still exist, but we have the author and a key subject (or person behind subject) in the same comment section? Not even like it's particularly niche, 80s arcade games ported to 90s machines forum dot net or something.
- russellbeattie 3y ago
  It's not like we died or decided to suddenly switch careers and become car salesmen or something. I was just a blogger. I find it even more amazing when someone truly important or influential comments on HN on things they worked on, say in the 1990s. A while ago there was a thread about Sun Microsystems GUI which used PostScript and one of the original developers chimed in and I was astounded.
  - OJFord 3y ago
    Sure, sorry, I just thought it was nice. Yes obviously even older is even nicer. A lot of just bloggers 17y ago won't still have their blog (or not that one) up, these things rot. And then just you and someone it had a particular affect on happening to be in the same comment section (about something else) at the same time and noticing... Idk, whatever, I just thought it was nice!
iamjackg 3y ago
I used Opera Mini for many, many years on a variety of phones, from "dumb" feature phones to my N-Gage. What an incredible product it was! Thank you for allowing me to read cool stuff in Wikipedia while I was bored in school. It made things a lot more bearable.
russellbeattie 3y ago
Wow! That's a blast from the past! I'm flattered the post meant so much to you and your team that you remember it 17 years later!! The review was well deserved, Opera showed how good browsers could be on mobile, and really presaged how important they would become once smartphones took off. You guys were way ahead of your time. I still find it interesting how personal blogs could have an impact back then when they were still a relatively new idea. Google gave us preferential placement in searches, and the results for many of us was a boost in our careers and an outsized notoriety. You're not the only one who's contacted me years later about something I wrote back when. I would never have predicted that at the time. I appreciate you commenting about it!

by tpmx 3y ago

codetrotter 3y ago

The Opera Mini browser was amazing. Did any of the people that worked on it end up working on anything open source making use of the same ideas? I’m dreaming of having an open source backend that I could run myself on my server, and that would similarly download and compress pages and then send a representation of the page that can be displayed on my iPhone without the app running any JS or anything. Greater security, and also it would make me able to browse even in bad coverage areas where currently all that happens is I wait an eternity for things to try to load and they just time out. Basically, I wish there was an open source backend and app that behaved like Opera Mini used to.

tpmx 3y ago
(Not that I'm aware of.) Web pages don't really work without in-page/dynamic javascript any longer. On the other hand it's now cheaper than ever to just have a full-blown webkit instance in the cloud and just sync/stream the dom tree paints to the client. A bunch of products do that, I think. Back then we had a moat because a) Opera's Presto used so much less memory than Webkit - after having gone through so many painful memory optimization efforts, particularly with Japanese mobile browser deliveries, but also with Symbian. b) We figured out a way of making 90% of the web javascript work be keeping "tabs" around on the server for a few minutes and then just replaying carefully selected input events and capturing the output, with some kinda clever heuristics. That combined with the low memory usage did it. Webkit used like 10x more memory per tab/window back then, iirc. And RAM was expensive.

OJFord 3y ago

To get even more meta, isn't it quite incredible that 17y later not only does the blog still exist, but we have the author and a key subject (or person behind subject) in the same comment section? Not even like it's particularly niche, 80s arcade games ported to 90s machines forum dot net or something.

russellbeattie 3y ago
It's not like we died or decided to suddenly switch careers and become car salesmen or something. I was just a blogger. I find it even more amazing when someone truly important or influential comments on HN on things they worked on, say in the 1990s. A while ago there was a thread about Sun Microsystems GUI which used PostScript and one of the original developers chimed in and I was astounded.
- OJFord 3y ago
  Sure, sorry, I just thought it was nice. Yes obviously even older is even nicer. A lot of just bloggers 17y ago won't still have their blog (or not that one) up, these things rot. And then just you and someone it had a particular affect on happening to be in the same comment section (about something else) at the same time and noticing... Idk, whatever, I just thought it was nice!

iamjackg 3y ago

I used Opera Mini for many, many years on a variety of phones, from "dumb" feature phones to my N-Gage. What an incredible product it was! Thank you for allowing me to read cool stuff in Wikipedia while I was bored in school. It made things a lot more bearable.

russellbeattie 3y ago

Wow! That's a blast from the past! I'm flattered the post meant so much to you and your team that you remember it 17 years later!! The review was well deserved, Opera showed how good browsers could be on mobile, and really presaged how important they would become once smartphones took off. You guys were way ahead of your time. I still find it interesting how personal blogs could have an impact back then when they were still a relatively new idea. Google gave us preferential placement in searches, and the results for many of us was a boost in our careers and an outsized notoriety. You're not the only one who's contacted me years later about something I wrote back when. I would never have predicted that at the time. I appreciate you commenting about it!