The flip phone web: browsing with the original Opera Mini
67 comments
·May 29, 2025fidotron
kalleboo
Another example of a really well-done J2ME app was Google Maps. It had GPS and street view support at the same time as iPhone only did tower location and Google wouldn't license them Street View.
With a high-end Sony Ericsson feature phone, I could multitask(!) between Opera Mini, a J2ME twitter client, IRC client, train timetable app, Google Maps, etc better than a Symbian S60 smartphone could (and iPhone of course couldn't multitask at all) https://kalleboo.com/linked/se_j2me_multitask.jpg
vel0city
I was there dude, I experienced that same thing. Too many people were unaware of what was available at the time.
skhameneh
> WAP/WML was a near total flop
Not quite, WAP evolved into WAP 2.0 and WML was replaced with xHTML. For a long period of time WAP 2.0 was the only standard while mobile development evolved. Even as HTML support grew in the mobile space, there was a very solid duration of time where WAP 2.0 was the most supported across the majority of devices and browsers (in the mobile space). And FWIW, I wouldn’t consider WML a flop, because that was the only mobile standard supported on most phones before the iPhone.
miki123211
> As someone else mentioned imode was way more popular, at least in Japan. (I happen to have been slightly involved in the relative failure of a rollout in France).
Do you have any info on what the iMode technical stack was like? The information available on the internet (at least in English) is scarce.
fidotron
Someone somewhere will have a French copy of the tech specs, because Bouygues paid to have the whole lot translated before any work could commence.
One oddity of the Japanese setup was NTT essentially ran a cloud, of a huge pile of HP-UX servers with Oracle/JVM etc. somewhere in Yokohama which was running all the backend. When I said NTT went to big efforts to get companies on board this is what I mean: they were incredibly proactive about getting integrations into this happening, to the point of entirely hosting it on site if necessary and essentially doing the work themselves for anyone they thought valuable enough. I don't believe any version outside Japan ever replicated this, and it was the magic ingredient along with persistent data connections.
The closest thing the west saw to that in practice was the Sidekick, but that never got the level of third party support.
It's fairly widely understood that i-mode used CHTML but I'm unfamiliar with the lower levels of the networking stack. App wise there was Java but not normal J2ME. All I can remember that was unique was their scratchpad memory area (which was just way too big), and billing APIs!
lysace
> The result of all that is in 2005 J2ME was surprisingly capable, but virtually no one was using it, and so Opera Mini was kind of by itself for a while.
Compatibility with J2ME was really fragmented and this was the time when there were literally thousands of phone models in the market at the same time, so it took a sizeable effort to ship something that worked well.
With Opera Mini we had about 5-6 people (developers+QA) working on J2ME device compatibility continuously. And a really impressive physical device library. I think it had about 2.5k devices in the end.
Once you got really popular though, most device manufacturers started including compatibility with your app in their shipping criterias, so then it suddenly got really easy.
vel0city
5 to 6 people managed to make an app compatible across 2,500 different devices models at a time when there was practically no hardware standardization, and you say that was a hard thing?
I will say though, thank you for your work on it. It was an awesome product back in the day, I was incredibly grateful.
fidotron
By 2005 J2ME fragmentation was nothing like as bad as what Android would become, and remains greatly exaggerated. By that point the 3650 and T610 were getting to be history, and Siemens were on the edge of dropping out.
It was one of those things that was very surmountable if the market pull would have been there to overcome it, but there wasn't demand because the phone form factors of the time sucked for apps and games.
> With Opera Mini we had about 5-6 people (developers+QA) working on J2ME device compatibility continuously.
You realize this is tiny? To cover things like Blackberry and Brew took significantly more effort than that, and this is pre GPU or camera variation being a thing.
lysace
I meant throughout the life span of J2ME, not specifically in 2005. We built Opera Mini 1.0 in 8 months with a team starting with about 2-3 people, growing to about 10.
> You realize this is tiny?
Well, yes - I remember being happy that the big US companies found this to be too much work, leaving the market to some scrappy Scandinavians (Opera was based out of Oslo, Norway; Opera Mini was based out of a satellite office in Linköping, Sweden.)
I was particularly confused about why Google didn't build a J2ME browser app, having acquired Reqwireless (Waterloo, Ontario). I believe they had that team build a web-to-wap proxy on google.com instead. Speculation: Perhaps Andy Rubin/Android killed the (to me) obvious Google J2ME browser?
kergonath
> I happen to have been slightly involved in the relative failure of a rollout in France
Was it with Bouygues? IIRC they were basically the only provider to advertise i-mode.
Anyway, i-mode might have been a flop, but for a brief moment in time I enjoyed being on the bleeding edge with things like Opera Mini on my Sony Ericsson. Those were the days.
fidotron
> Was it with Bouygues?
It was. For reasons that now escape me I was doing billing integration work for it.
RandallBrown
> This is back around when Apple had done Webkit just for the Mac
I would be surprised if they didn't build Webkit with the iPhone in mind.
cyberax
> The result of all that is in 2005 J2ME was surprisingly capable
On the contrary, J2ME was nearly useless without vendor-specific extensions. And the quality of implementations varied quite a bit.
iamjackg
I have very fond memories of using Opera Mini on my N-Gage and on a bunch of later feature phones that only had J2ME support. It felt revolutionary at the time, especially since data plans were still extremely restrictive.
Wifi on phones was also not quite a thing yet, so I had found an application for S60 phones that allowed them to share a computer's connection via Bluetooth. The range was extremely limited, but enough for me to browse the internet from my bed!
kccqzy
I only remember doing the reverse: when the wireless AP at home broke down, I created a Bluetooth PAN to use the cellular Internet connection on my computer. Didn't need to install any J2ME app. (At that time desktop OSes had basically no background process that would use the Internet silently. )
panstromek
I wrote a nostalgic post on opera mini few weeks ago (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/
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.
podlp
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-m...
Disclaimer: I work at CloudMosa, the company that makes Cloud Phone
catwhatcat
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?
lysace
> 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.
jerlam
Opera was amazing in the early days of the web, it was one of the few programs that I gladly paid money for.
I used to browse without images and CSS (but only one keyboard shortcut away) when bandwidth was low and web development was amateurish. Opera Mini took another leap forward to move rendering off slow smartphones.
Things have changed a lot in 20 years. My smartphone is probably faster than most computers of that era. And Opera is a zombie company trying to take advantage of its users.
kstrauser
> My smartphone is probably faster than most computers of that era.
That's an understatement. With the usual caveats that benchmarks lie and all that, here's a pretty fast server I had in 2008 or so vs a modern iPhone[0]. The single core scores are 430 and 3427 respectively, and multi-core scores are 745 vs 8494. The phone wipes the floor with the server on normal tasks. On things that use huge amounts of FLOPS like object detection, it's just about 100x faster.
In addition, the entire A18 SoC uses around 10W max, vs the E8400 burning 65W by itself.
If you want to go back to exactly 20 years ago, there's a Pentium 4 vs an iPhone.[1] It had single/multi-core performance of 185/216 at 85W (by itself, not including chipset and RAM), and the phone runs math stuff around 500x faster.
Yes. Your smartphone is many times faster than most computers of that era.
[0] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/12190780?baseli...
[1]
burningChrome
I remember just being new to web development and all the developers were so bougie about only using Opera because it was adopting the HTML5 standards faster than any other company. They were one of the first companies to develop standards for video if I remember correctly. They also were the first browser to offer ad blocking which was getting really intrusive.
exiguus
I remember using Opera Mini during mobile device testing back in the day. I didn't know (or remember) that it used a technique to render pages on a server before sending them to Mobile. But i remember, that i also used it with an emulator on desktop (for Palm PDAs).
I was very sad when Opera stopped its development with version 12 and shut down all its services, including the dev blog and bookmark service. Opera was my main browser in the 2000s, and I used it for web development, as well as an email client and feed reader. Recently, since they have a working email client, I started using Opera again, now Vivaldi (CEO is also Jon von Tetzchner).
longnighthn
I still remember this. In China, people had used its ability to bypass the Great Firewall to access websites that were blocked by the CCP gov.
aspizu
I found my old j2me phone lying around, tried using it as a daily driver for a while. wanted to browse geminispace so wrote a j2me gemini browser. maybe I should write a blog about my experience.
yaky
That would be fun to read. Did you get the gemini browser to work? AFAIK getting TLS working on old devices could be difficult.
adithyassekhar
A similar but "data leaky". one was UC browser. These two were constantly compared back in the day, their entire selling point was faster downloads over opera mini. I remember doing speed tests with both on my old nokia and Samsung feature phones on 2g networks. I'm extremely grateful these browsers exist otherwise I wouldn't have been browsing zdnet, old techradar, w3schools, phpeasystep, betanews etc. while I was 12. They got me into the world of tech and now I am working in it.
Opera mini did support video playback on some phones especially on YouTube. It opens the phone's inbuilt video player with an RTSP link to the 3gp version of the video. I guess it stopped working when YouTube removed RTSP? Oh that brings a lot of memories about real player which was also available on j2me as well as pc.
nfriedly
I have some good memories of Opera Mini. One time I ended up locked out of my house and spent a couple of hours browsing the web in Opera Mini on a 2G candybar phone with a ~1.5" screen until someone else with a key arrived. It was slow, but not too bad.
srmarm
I did my first toilet browsing on a Sony Ericsson K750i on Edge network. For forums it worked really well. I suspect this site would have worked well on it.
asveikau
My memories are of looking up stuff at the bar and grill in my college town.
It could also browse an early iteration of the full desktop web Facebook UI, at a time when they had no mobile app.
lxgr
Opera Mini was (or rather is – the servers are still up!) the best.
My 100 MB/month plan on an early Symbian smartphone went incredibly far with it, and the browsing experience was usually better than on both the integrated WebKit browser and Opera Mobile – so much so that I actually ended up switching back to a feature phone with J2ME.
rs186
Fun fact: Opera Mini was used as a way for Chinese users to get around GFW, until the loophole was closed by Opera, and all users redirected to a special Chinese version of the app.
grishka
I tested an older version of Opera Mini, iirc 4.x, on an actual 00s phone (we still have 2G networks with no plans to shut them down) out of curiosity several months ago, and to my great surprise, it worked too. Exactly like it did back in 2007. And yes, there were those interstitial ads too. Those definitely weren't a thing in 2007.
Opera Mini appeared at a strange time. This is back around when Apple had done Webkit just for the Mac (derived from KHTML) and Nokia thought it would be cool on S60, and it was.
WAP/WML was a near total flop, although oddly had a second life on interactive TV in the UK where Sky funded creation of a WML browser in OpenTV to enable faster turnaround of new apps. (OpenTV was neither open nor particularly consistent between devices, and the normal mode of delivering content via satellite was difficult logistically).
As someone else mentioned imode was way more popular, at least in Japan. (I happen to have been slightly involved in the relative failure of a rollout in France). NTT went to massive lengths to get Japanese companies up and running on imode, such that by about 2002 huge amounts of ecommerce were being done on it, including B2B. I know of major electronics components vendors doing >70% of their sales (by value) via mobile Internet in Japan by 2005. imode didn't really do well in the 3G transition though, and the increased complexity of the phones led to a lot of bad software on them, which was the opportunity Apple ultimately exploited.
The result of all that is in 2005 J2ME was surprisingly capable, but virtually no one was using it, and so Opera Mini was kind of by itself for a while. The company that does a lot of transport ticketing in the UK had at one point a phenomenal mobile banking prototype (that worked) but was told by the banks they simply weren't ready for it, and the banks didn't think the customers were either, which was actually the truth, and so why they pivoted.