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I wrote a nostalgic post on opera mini few weeks ago (https://yoyo-code.com/love-letter-to-opera-mini/ https://yoyo-code.com/love-letter-to-opera-mini/) and som

I wrote a nostalgic post on opera mini few weeks ago (https://yoyo-code.com/love-letter-to-opera-mini/ 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/ 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.

lysace 1y ago
> 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.
- vel0city 1y ago
  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.
podlp 1y ago
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-mini/ https://developer.cloudfone.com/blog/cloud-phone-vs.-opera-m... Disclaimer: I work at CloudMosa, the company that makes Cloud Phone
- catwhatcat 1y ago
  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?
  - podlp 1y ago
    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

lysace 1y ago

> 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.

vel0city 1y ago
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.

podlp 1y ago

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-mini/ https://developer.cloudfone.com/blog/cloud-phone-vs.-opera-m... Disclaimer: I work at CloudMosa, the company that makes Cloud Phone

catwhatcat 1y ago
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?
- podlp 1y ago
  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