

Opera holds the web's most valuable secret - andyking
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/08/opera_transaction_cache/

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aw3c2
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/>

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eli
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.

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axod
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.

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chrislloyd
"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.

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flawawa2
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.

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

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

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moxiemk1
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.

~~~
isani
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.

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zitterbewegung
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.

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jarek
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.

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Indyan
"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.

~~~
jarek
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.

~~~
Indyan
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.

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ashish_0x90
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?

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thezilch
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.

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stygianguest
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.

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pmjordan
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.

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jarek
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.

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iwr
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.

~~~
jarek
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...

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

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famrey
Maybe you should read the article, then?

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celticjames
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.

~~~
famrey
That could be because Skyfire is, frankly, crap.

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DjDarkman
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.

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

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

