opera mini
Opera mini
is part of the Opera mobile division of Opera, the company behind the
quite popular browser. They recently launched a campaign for mobile
phones here in Germany. By just sending one SMS to a carrier
independant number, one receives Opera Mini back, a Java application
that is tailored to the phone. The requirements list is very short: a
Java capable mobile phone, and a GPRS internet connection. Since many
years Java is supported on most mobile phones around, therefore this
should be no impediment to a wider adoption. What is interesting now is
how this browser operates. It has some sort of centralized personalized
repository, that serves each user in particular. The local application,
the opera mini, doesn't resemble a browser at all, it's more of a
rendering engine. The HTTP request travels from this application to
Opera servers, it's these servers that request the webpage from the
desired website, render the webpages there on the opera servers, cut
the images down, resizes them, reformats html so that by the time it it
sent back to the browser, it can be even 5 times lighter than the
original webpage. Pages cache, history, cookies, all is stored server
side. So Opera behaves like a giant personalised proxy, which serves
user requests in this centralized way. More in Opera mini FAQ.
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