Opera holds the web's most valuable secret | Hacker News Reader

Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

theregister.co.uk

200 pointsandyking63 comments

Opera Mobile will be released for Android tomorrow. I can't wait to finally have a great browser on my phone (the tab limitations of the default one make it unusable for me. All alternatives have major faults or drawbacks). http://www.opera.com/mobile/next/

I'm a big Opera fan, but xScope has been great for me on Android.

You are right in being excited about it. It's a huge step up from the default browser and even Dolphin HD.

I'm not personally a huge fan of it, but the Dolphin browser offers a better tab interface (as well as other features) and has been out on Android for some time.

From video it looks like Opera Mobile for Andorid does not support resizing to fill the screen on double tap, you have to adjust it manually :(

In summary, Opera does proxying and caching for its mobile browser.

The article does very little to tell us why that's 'valuable' or indeed a secret.

Page 2

Yes, I read that. Care to summarize?

You build an ad network that 'performs arbitrage on competing ad networks'. Opera makes money on the margin that potential advertisers save. This works because Opera controls the pipeline from web to phone.

I might be particularly dense today, but I don't get the link between controlling the pipeline and building an arbitrage ad network. Why can't you do one without the other?

Edit: to spell out my confusion. If you want to arbitrage ads, content providers would (presumably) need to include your ads in their content one way or another, so I don't see what advantage controlling the pipeline gives you. If you just want to inject ads into the content you're serving simply because you control the pipeline, then you can just as well inject regular ads, I don't see where the arbitrage part comes in.

I haven't thought about this extensively, but quickly considering this, I'd imagine one would be able to target users with ad networks much as you can do that with ads today. Given a number of networks, display ads from the network most likely to get a click-through from the user under consideration.

I think a key point of arbitrage is that you do both of the transactions (the buying and the selling) at the same time.

This insulates the person doing the arbitrage from losing money because one or both of the markets changed (it is 'theoretically risk free').

So they would be theoretically be trading page impressions as they occur, to the highest bidder. Compare this to AdWords, which offers 'some amount of Cents' per impression.

You sell your adspace to opera, opera sells that AdSpace to someone else, dynamically based on market prices. (They could even sell it Google or whoever). Its like an ad stock market.

At least, that is my (very) speculative understanding.

edit: The key point is that they control the cache, so if you sell them ads and your page goes through the cache, they can insert it (whoever's ad it is) quickly. Otherwise it would be an extra level of indirection loading the ad.

RIM does too. But it doesn't have the ability and/or the inclination to swap out ads.

The web requests would allow Opera to do some serious data-mining to sell advertising.

More especially since they hijack HTTPS sessions. I always thought that playing MITM and caching secure sessions created a strong incentive to behave badly.

They don't do that:

from

http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/03/13/

Your privacy is important

Even when Turbo is enabled, encrypted traffic does not go through our compression servers. This means that when you are on a SSL site, we bypass these traffic and let you communicate with the SSL site directly. Opera generates statistics of the usage of Opera Turbo, but these are aggregated numbers and no information can be linked to a single user. Opera does not store any users’ private information.

Presumably that is a feature of the desktop version?

http://www.opera.com/mobile/help/faq/#connection

"Is there any end-to-end security between my handset and — for example — paypal.com or my bank?"

"Opera Mini uses a transcoder server to translate HTML/CSS/JavaScript into a more compact format. It will also shrink any images to fit the screen of your handset. This translation step makes Opera Mini fast, small, and also very cheap to use. To be able to do this translation, the Opera Mini server needs to have access to the unencrypted version of the webpage. Therefore no end-to-end encryption between the client and the remote web server is possible.

If you need full end-to-end encryption, you should use a full web browser such as Opera Mobile."

Turbo and Mini aren't the same thing; Turbo mostly just compresses everything and lossily recompresses images to make them smaller, while Mini outright doesn't have a local HTML rendering engine.

Opera Mini tells you about that (and that the connection isn't actually protected) and discourage you from continue when you try to enter any https site.

"they hijack HTTPS sessions"

Trolling much? They aren't hijacking anything. Opera Mini is a thin client (which lets it run on just about any phone, including old and crappy ones), so they have no choice but to pass everything through the rendering engine on their servers.

I'm not buying it. ISPs have had access to way more request data for years and haven't had success selling advertising. Site owners, privacy advocates and net neutrality folks would freak out and shut it down in a heart beat.

"Behavioural advertising". Opera could potentially collect information on mobile users' browsing habits/history. Should it decide to sell this information to third parties it would be worth a lot.

If Opera decided to act on this it could be the most valuable part of its business model. GMail etc. have shown that people are willing to pay with their privacy.

Disclaimer: I'm interning (so I don't know anything special) for Opera, but the opinions here purely my own.

I was using Opera Mini on my mobile under the assumption that they value my privacy and do not store any data. If they would start doing this, it would outrage me enough that I might potentially even go back to Firefox on my desktop.

The article also says Opera is aware that doing this could destroy their business, for the reasons you give, so they plan not to.

Yeah people always say "They could sell data".

I don't really see who would buy behavioral data on peoples browsing habits. That's fairly worthless unless you have a clear route to monetize it and connect back to those users.

GMail has a clear route - they show advertising on gmail.

All Opera could do is mess around with web pages, inserting their own advertising, or messing with content. Which would enrage users and website owners alike. As soon as they try to monetize, people will stop using it.

I use Opera mini extensively on my phone, probably more than the Phone/SMS aspects. I would certainly opt in for all kinds of intrusive behaviour (behavioral advertising, changing ads, adding appropriate ads sometimes) to allow Opera to continue offering that proxying service for free and allocating development resources when required. ie. My Samsung B3310 doesn't let me rotate Opera Mini so using the keyboard is awkward but surely there are so many phones out there that it would take considerable resources for Opera to continue to respond to all the feedback.

I use AdThwart on my desktop Google Chrome though!

Yes it does. Basically it says that opera intends to strip out ads from the pages it serves and replace them with new ads. Which new ads? Opera will simply auction the space to the highest bidder. Obviously this will only work for ads that go through its servers, but apparently it controls a large proportion of the mobile proxying/caching market. Sounds nice in theory, not sure whether it will hold up in practice. Note they state explicitly they will NOT perform behavioural advertising.

That's what I read on first glance, but then thought "haha nah that's illegal, immoral, and only a complete idiot would go down that route".

I'll believe it when I see it (And then I'll block access for Opera mini users to my website).

Out of interest, what's illegal about it?

You are wrong.

Opera will NOT strip out ads from pages.

What Opera will do is to let the owner of the page choose to serve ads to mobile browsers through Opera's ad network.

So any ads from Opera on a site will be because the owner of the site requested them.

Opera Mini on the iPhone 4 is a pretty bad experience. Hope they get time to update it soon.

Indeed: the article claimed Opera mini made mobile Safari feel painful to use, which in my experience is patently false.

It is only occasionally noticeably faster, and the rendering is far worse. Mobile Safari is great because it actually renders sites appropriately. Opera mini is great because it's faster than your built-in phone browser, but it doesn't compete with real browsers even when it's marginally faster.

Opera mini tends to jumble pages in unpredictable ways. The way it works is they transform the page into an intermediary format and transmit that to the phone. I don't think Opera has ever documented in depth what kinds of changes happen in the process.

Opera Mobile is the real mobile browser for smartphones. However, Opera can't develop O Mobile for iPhone due to App Store's TOS. Opera Mini can't handle modern websites using AJAX etc. because it can't render anything locally. It simply parses the data sent to it by the servers, which are responsible for rendering the website and compressing it.

Also, the speed benefits are significant, only if you are on a slow connection.

Opera Mini stores the page state on their servers. If you click on a JS link then the Opera Mini client treats it like a new page load, but the server is just executing the JS and resending the page.

Opera Mini on the iPhone 4 is a pretty bad experience.

What they say about the economics of mobile bandwidth and computing power vs. server bandwidth/CPU rings true, however. The trick would be to optimize the rendering for specific mobile browsers. One could even use the "native" rendering engine to do this. Apple should implement this trick for mobile Safari, optimized for the specific screen sizes of the various iDevices. Not only would this save rendering time and battery power on those devices, it would enable yet another advertising strategy for them.

Opera Mini is a terrible experience on the iPhone in general. They apparently never expected it to be accepted and pushed a quick (and bad) port of the Android version.

Probably wary of bad publicity (for once) Apple accepted the application… and since then Opera barely touched it. No update to the non-standard look&feel, no update to the non-standard settings management (and widgets), no update to the awful zoom… and apparently barely useable on the iPhone 4…

And since they have't done any update to it since May while they released 5.1 for just about every other smartphone, I'm not exactly expecting anything.

It sort of begs the question will opera still be relevant in a few years down the line as rendering on phones gets cheaper and faster.

Advertising expands as to fill the available computing power. Content may too. There'll always be a place for an optimized browser, even if just to save battery life.

It kinda does. With the technology they have right now, I'd take interactive-javascript-capable Opera Mobile over proxying Opera Mini any day. But if in a year, Opera Mobile can make, one way or another†, Facebook or new Twitter or Google-Wave-of-the-day or any modern website noticeably faster, I won't care much if it means my data is going through Opera's servers, just like I don't care my email is on Google's servers.

[†] super-effective image and content compression? Elimination of multiple-server DNS lookups/requests/transfers? Compiling Javascript into a device's or Opera-internal "native" code on the server? I don't believe we've seen the last yet.

"With the technology they have right now, I'd take interactive-javascript-capable Opera Mobile over proxying Opera Mini any day."

Take a look at the Turbo feature in Opera Mobile. It's similar to the Turbo feature on desktop. Once again, data is being sent through the server and it is being compressed. However, Turbo is capable of handling interactive-web-content (JavaScripts) because the rendering part is still being done locally.

To be quite frank, I found that Opera Turbo rarely sped me up noticeably, and sometimes slowed me down. Just one user's experience in North America today, but there's definitely room for improvement.

If your net speed is more than 512 KBPs you are not going to notice any improvements whatsover, rather (as you said) you might notice delays due to the increased overhead. However, on slower connnections the effect is marked. This is because a 100 KBps connection can download 100KB in 1 sec and 200 KB in 2 sec. On the other hand a 10 KBps connection will require 10 sec and 20 sec respectively. And, in this case, the effect of Opera's compression becomes noticeable.

P.S. What Opera is doing is similar to what www.onspeed.com does. I used to use that during my dialup days, and it was a big big help.

I doubt it. Not only phones get increasingly powerful, but the core is also evolving, transitioning to IP and LTE being just around the corner; I believe pilot deployments have already started in the US and Japan.

The problem is that most of the world is not going to be using these powerful phones, and in the parts of the world where you can use them, operators are already killing unlimited data plans.

You are living in a dream world if you think compression is going away any time soon.

Yes, because Opera Mini can run on faster phones, but most sold phones are still the cheap ones, and that isn't changing any time soon.

And with operators cutting down on data plans, limited bandwidth isn't going away any time soon either.

I am wondering though how the content providers themselves will react to opera deciding ad strategy on content provided by them if this happens. Right now opera is stripping all the ads and so even now content providers are only getting traffic and are not actually making money by any ads that they may be serving or any other content monetization strategy. How much benefit the providers will get really by opera's this move if any? Will the providers be then asked to pay to be in control of ads served on their content? Will they will need adapt to different ads system if the user is using opera as compared to some other browser?

For those, like myself, that were wondering why there is talk about Opera Mobile being released, tomorrow, for Android -- I thought I already have Opera on my phone. After brief gleaning, I have Opera Mini, and here is what to expect with Opera Mobile: http://www.opera.com/mobile/specs/ -- mostly just the rendering engine being available to the device, as opposed to being server based.

But what to do with such a cache? Build a new search engine to compete with google? I sincerely hope they will do that, but it cannot be easy. That said, if you have the cache, you might as well try.

By the way, what about online banking etc. They are introducing yet another weak point by playing the middle man.

They don't play MITM to https sites for the Turbo feature in Opera Mobile or Desktop. No idea what they do for Opera Mini.

Opera Mini is required to MITM by its design; it can't render HTML, only OPML fed to it by Opera's servers. I don't know what exactly the security implications are.

Yeah, the best I can come up with is that you have to trust them that the data never makes it to the disk. But then they don't seem to be disk caching anything at all.

Not to confuse OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language), used to aggregate RSS files with OBML (Opera Binary Markup Language).

I was confused why or how OPML would serve Opera's purposes in this instance.

Sorry about that -- I was wrongly convinced the Opera technology was called OPML, too. I was a little bit surprised by lack of Opera-centric results when googling it...

Quote: "All communication between the Opera Mini servers and the Opera Mini client on your phone is encrypted?" Source: http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2010/04/15/public-wifi

So basically, as long as Opera's security is ok, we are ok. However, if someone manages to find a hole, we might be screwed. But, how practical is it to launch an attack on a mobile webbrowser that is possibly using encrypted WiFi along with a encrypted communication channel? May be someone else can shed more light on this.

Your ISP can act as a MITM and they can even poison DNS requests.

Other than that, governments can corrupt the certificate-issuing authorities and present you with forged SSL credentials.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/03/researchers-reveal-like...

I really do not see how this all proxy thing makes it "most valuable secret"

Maybe you should read the article, then?

There's another company, Skyfire, that's been pushing a similar solution for the past few years. I've never met anyone who actually uses it.

That could be because Skyfire is, frankly, crap.

Opera Mini is a HTML/Image viewer, not a real browser, it's too crippled to be called a web browser.

Comparing Opera's cache to Google's cache is not a good idea, they work differently.

Opera Mini browses the web. It's a browser.

Funny thing is that, as bandwidth keeps increasing, server side caching will be less and less meaningful.

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