I’m dreaming of having an open source backend that I could run myself on my server, and that would similarly download and compress pages and then send a representation of the page that can be displayed on my iPhone without the app running any JS or anything.
Greater security, and also it would make me able to browse even in bad coverage areas where currently all that happens is I wait an eternity for things to try to load and they just time out.
Basically, I wish there was an open source backend and app that behaved like Opera Mini used to.
Web pages don't really work without in-page/dynamic javascript any longer.
On the other hand it's now cheaper than ever to just have a full-blown webkit instance in the cloud and just sync/stream the dom tree paints to the client. A bunch of products do that, I think.
Back then we had a moat because
a) Opera's Presto used so much less memory than Webkit - after having gone through so many painful memory optimization efforts, particularly with Japanese mobile browser deliveries, but also with Symbian.
b) We figured out a way of making 90% of the web javascript work be keeping "tabs" around on the server for a few minutes and then just replaying carefully selected input events and capturing the output, with some kinda clever heuristics. That combined with the low memory usage did it.
Webkit used like 10x more memory per tab/window back then, iirc. And RAM was expensive.
I still find it interesting how personal blogs could have an impact back then when they were still a relatively new idea. Google gave us preferential placement in searches, and the results for many of us was a boost in our careers and an outsized notoriety. You're not the only one who's contacted me years later about something I wrote back when. I would never have predicted that at the time.
I appreciate you commenting about it!
Not even like it's particularly niche, 80s arcade games ported to 90s machines forum dot net or something.