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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 o

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.