August 2005
Opera Mini pilot launched
Opera introduced Opera Mini on August 10, 2005 as a TV 2 Norway pilot — a proxy-based mobile browser; worldwide launch followed on January 24, 2006.
What it was for
Opera Mini brought the web to billions of low-end phones long before smartphones were common: pages were rendered remotely, shrunk, and sent as images or simplified markup. It was how many users in emerging markets first experienced email, news, and search on a phone.
Companies
- Opera
Why it's here
Opera Mini pioneered mobile web access before the iPhoneApple's smartphone line — touch-first mobile computing and the App Store ecosystem since 2007. era.
Why it mattered
Server-side compression made browsing usable on 2G networks and tiny screens worldwide.
What it solved
Feature phones lacked the CPUCentral processing unit — the primary chip that executes program instructions. and bandwidth to run full desktop browsers locally.
Media
- ImageOpera Mini
Opera, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Related
- Opera 2.0 publicly releasedApril 1996
- Safari announced at MacworldJanuary 7, 2003