Opera Mini was first released in 2005 as a web browser for mobile phones, with the ability to load full websites by sending most of the work to an external server. It was a massive hit, but it started to fade out of relevance once smartphones entered mainstream use.
Opera Mini still exists today as a web browser for iPhone and Android—it’s now just a tweaked version of the regular Opera mobile browser, and you shouldn’t use Opera browsers. However, the original Java ME-based version is still functional, and you can even use it on modern computers.
↫ Corbin Davenport
I remember using Opera Mini back in the day on my PocketPC and Palm devices. It wasn’t my main browser on those devices, but if some site I really needed was acting up, Opera Mini could be a lifesaver, but as we all remember, the mobile web before the arrival of the iPhone was a trashfire. Interestingly enough, we circled back to the mobile web being a trashfire, but at least we can block ads now to make it bearable.
Since Opera Mini is just a Java application, the client part of the equation will probably remain executable for a long time, but once Opera decides to close the server side of things, it will stop being useful. Perhaps one day someone will reverse-engineer the protocol and APIs, paving the way for a custom server we can all run as part of the retrocomputing hobby.
There’s always someone crazy and dedicated enough.
Don’t use Opera.
Don’t use Brave
https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/
While I agree, I’ve found hard to convince anyone of that. Most people while say some variation of “who cares? Don’t expect privacy on the Internet” which is ridiculous.
One fun fact about the opera mini servers is that they were initially coded using the somewhat unknown pike programming language ( https://pike.lysator.liu.se/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_(programming_language) ) .
There is some information about it in this hackernews thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31453255 ):
[quote]
We built the Opera Mini server infrastructure based on Pike, starting back in 2004-2005 with a team that initially mostly came from the Roxen/Spinner days (a separate company). I started working there in 97, and I was kinda late to the party – it started out in 93/94.
I still miss working with this language. It just makes so much sense to me.
The way I think of it is as a quite a lot more performant version of Python with a C-like syntax and a much more consistently designed – while still very rich – standard library.
The downside is of course that compared to Python, Pike is now almost completely unknown. The ecosystem is tiny, etc. We really sucked at marketing the language in the early critical days and then after a while kind of gave up and focused on using it to build commercial systems instead.
[/quote]
I’ve used pike extensively, and I like it quite a bit.
When I have to use C#, I’m musing about the differences between pike and C#, and almost every time I feel the choice by the pike language architects is more natural than the one used in C#… pike is a very nice language indeed, with a lot of useful libraries, and quite fast.
Oh wow, i don’t think i have seen Pike mentioned anywhere for more than 20 years. I used it briefly for making a Roxen application way back. Having spent a lot of time with LPC, transitioning to Pike was very easy, and with the right mixed mode setup in Emacs, the Roxen development was quite nice.
I still use it sometimes when I’m outdoors and there is a WiFi hotspot. I don’t have any device that runs a better browser, but it can be nice to read up on some news. There are quite a few sites that still work good enough.
Back from the future:
Thom links to newest blog post Cameron Kaiser and his new Opera Mini-compatible proxy written in perl (probably perl).
>”as we all remember, the mobile web before the arrival of the iPhone was a trashfire”
I remember that I could chat with people in Asia on my flip phone using MSN messenger in a web browser for hours while keeping up with all the balls and strikes in baseball games, all just using kilobytes of data. Now those same functions on the web using current smartphones would take up GB’s of data in a hurry.
You can’t really use any of today’s smartphones without an unlimited data plan, unless you are very careful not to surf the web and especially not to watch any videos anytime you aren’t on wifi.
> Interestingly enough, we circled back to the mobile web being a trashfire, but at least we can block ads now to make it bearable.
Amusingly, modern mobile opera mini also has one, but then proceeds to inject its own (full screen pop-up) ads.
I remember when Opera was cool, back when they had their own engine. They even sponsored an MMA fighter.
I remember running it on my old Palm Treo 700p. It was cool, but it was slooooow, even when that hardware was still considered fancy.
I think I still have it in a drawer somewhere, but I’d be surprised if the battery will hold a charge.
Treos, like anything else from the US at the time, was crap. Nice but crap.
Yet Operamini was (by far) the best browser available for the platform, for sure it was the fastest one.
I even used Operamini for PalmOS inside WebOS just because even with the emulator in the middle it was still the best browser available when the Palm PRE was released
I read OSnews since the dawn of time, albeit I never posted too much here, and I share Thom’s ideas almost always.
With one exception, his longstanding and evident bias againist Opera (and now Vivaldi) drives me crazy.
Opera (I mean the real, presto based thing) was the best browser out there, period.
Almost all the useful things that in 2025 are considered normal originated there, and were slowly cloned by all the competitors .
Tabbbed browsing, the sppped dial, the synced bookmarks/settings, the zoommable pages, the integrated email client, and so on, I could continue for a day listing.
Speaking of OperaMini it was literally a revolution, its the single thing that brought the Web in the pocked of everyone.
Literally everyone.
I remember when, during a long train journey, my P800 smarpthone (the very first real smartphone) ran out of power and I booked the next train using my mom’s Siemens SL55 (one of the smallest cellphone ever) and I did thanks operamini.
NOTHING at the time was remotely close, there were some browser for Palmos that anticipated the concept of pages rendered on the server side, but they were next to useless.
Operamini just worked and it it did using an incredible smll amount of resources.
I think the first releases were less than 10K (YES Kilobytes), and the data compression allowed to use it not Just with the then bleeding edge GPRS connections but even with older Dialup ones that at ran at the incredible sppeed of 9600 (14400 later) bps.
And BTW it wasn’t a “flipphone” thing only, for a while it was the best way to browse the web on Android as well, and even today, with many Smartphones coming with more power and more RAM than an average PC from just few years ago, Operamini is a life savior when the 3/4/5G network is down and you have to use the 2G as a fallback.
So please Thom, Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, Operamini wasn’t a curiosity. It was a RE-VO-LU-TION. It was a milestone, it was one of the most important SW released in tree decades.
The same league of Win95, IOS, Linux and alike…
Hear, hear.
I still had Opera Mini installed until about 2020 to use their 90% data saving feature for train journeys with bad reception.
And the original Presto Opera for desktops is still unsurpassed in terms of features and innovation. The Greatest of All Time. It really is a shame they didn’t open source the engine.
For the record there is a modded Opera 12 that, when released, was usable in 95% of websites.
Now it’s years since that release, but it still works in a good share of the WEB, the major fixes about SSL/TSL ciphers and alike are still valid today.