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Comment by girvo | Hacker News Reader

I've been a massive fan of Opera Mini for years now, and this is really impressive! I wonder how it's implemented? Years ago, on Windows Mobile (not Windows Phone) it struggled with Javascript. Is that still the case? Is it merely UIWebView + a proxy to do the compression?

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This release has a secondary new mode that we hope will replace the older OBML-without-javascript mode over time, as devices get faster. It's basically Opera Turbo v2, attempting to get optimally efficient network benefits of the old Opera Mini to work with full web rendering using webkit. (On iOS Apple have been thoughtful enough to make it possible to make it possible to replace the network layer of the built-in webkit component.)

Cool, so OBML remains on Presto until it is phased out completely?

Can you point to any papers/specs/sources concerning OBML or the likes?

I was always fascinated by it (and have been trying to do something similar for my own amusement, most recently with webkit), but while getting a serialised render tree to display is trivial, making something half as usable as Opera Mini has always been seems impossible.

I believe there is still a huge market for smaller devices (probably smaller than feature phones) on which this style of web access is much thought after.

Sorry, all of that is proprietary.

I believe it does server side compression and JavaScript parsing, then sends it to the device in a compressed format. So technically it's not really even a web browser.

Kind of. Current version has 3 modes. Regular browser, Mini mode (which sends pre-rendered web pages back to the phone) and Turbo mode which compresses images and videos.

Using Turbo mode for now, best of both worlds - data savings and compatability with all websites.

Since Apple only allow browsers use built-in webkit engine in iOS. The turbo mode is use Opera's proxy to compress data, and render them by webkit. Therefore the user agent says they are AppleWebKit:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) OPiOS/8.0.0.78865 Mobile/11D201 Safari/9537.53

But for "Opera Mini" mode, it will render the page at their server, then send to iOS device. so they can bypass the limit from Apple and save many bandwidth. Therefore the user agent is complete different:

Opera/9.80 (iPhone; Opera Mini/8.0.0/35.3088; U; zh) Presto/2.8.119 Version/11.10

> Presto/2.8.119

Wow. I'm surprised that Mini is still that far behind Desktop (2.12.388), but I guess updating Presto isn't exactly a high priority compared with moving to Blink.

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