If thousands of users are desperately trying to use your site everyday even when it's broken for them then I'd wager the business is missing out on profit.

Our company sell to developing countries too, and there's definitely money to be made.

If you don't want to support people who you automatically assume have no money to spend, go ahead and leave it on the table for us to collect. :)

Let's flip the argument around and try: 'by targeting users in more affluent regions, and using state of the art technology to deliver engaging content, you can make more money'. Does it make economic sense to go with a simpler site and accommodate users from poorer regions? How does that affect revenue versus using the latest eye candy and targeting iPhone users?

If a business doesn't care about users in developing countries, that's their call. I don't think either way is wrong but the front-end people should at least raise the issue and then go with what the client needs. So many websites target a relatively small geographic area that they can safely ignore Opera Mini users and continue to thrive.

>If thousands of users are desperately trying to use your site everyday even when it's broken for them then I'd wager the business is missing out on profit.

Not really. They might be perusing your e.g. news site for information, but wouldn't click in any ad anyway (and maybe, because of Opera Mini, they don't even see them).

That's the politically correct way to look at it but I don't think you're right.

With the advent of the $30 smartphone, by the time these countries have disposable income that you can indirectly or directly profit from, its likely that one of their first purchases is a better phone with a capable browser. Until then they're a waste of time and resources.

On Black Friday you could get a Moto E, unlocked and off contract, for $10. This phone has a quad core processor, an LTE radio, a gig of ram, and a 5 megapixel camera. Ten dollars gets you something that can outperform flagships from 2 years ago.

A faster smartphone won't reduce traffic. Even if you had the latest and greatest flagship phone you might still want to install opera mini if traffic cost per byte is sufficiently high.

And which magic exactly does that phone perform to reduce the bandwidth prices of their provider?

The same exact "magic" of MITM optimization that Opera performs is available in Chrome for Android. [1]

But even putting that aside, you're ignoring the fact that as these developing nations develop and have money that's worth going after, bandwidth is certainly going to become cheaper as well.

[1]: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2392284?hl=en

You really can't compare both.

Um, why not?

You can compare what Chrome does with Opera Turbo feature from Opera Mobile and desktop Opera, but not Opera Mini. It was definitely inspired by experiences from Opera Mini, but it's absolutely not comparable at all.

Opera Mini doesn't render webpages, it's all done server side. What's sent to the browser is a pile of highly compressed layers containing text and images and some metadata about what's clickable - and that's it. From HTML, JS and CSS point of view Opera Mini is a highly optimized, non-real time remote desktop client.

I've heavily used J2ME Opera Mini on my S40 dumbphones many years ago. Back then it was awesome. Today, when the only way to keep sanity when browsing the web on desktop is using NoScript, I doubt that using it would be as awesome as it was back then, and that's not really Opera Mini fault. After all, when using Opera Mini, you don't expect everything to work and render as it would on desktop browser - as long as content is shown and can be accessed properly, it's fine. However, in a world where crazy people use SPA frameworks for their blogs, it cannot be taken for granted.

I guess Chrome compresses the HTML and maybe recompresses the images. But what Opera Mini delivers to the user's browser has nothing to do with HTML, is completely stripped from any JS, etc

Opera Mini is also relatively unique in having great text-reflow which is an important feature for people with bad eyesight, even in rich countries.

Thanks. :) I obsessed quite a bit about this about 10 years ago. Yes, it's been 10 years since the important things in Opera Mini transcoding/system design happened. At first it enabled web browsing on new expensive Nokia, Sony Ericsson, etc phones primarily in Europe/Russia, then the focus shifted to Africa and Asia/India.

Back then I figured: when when you are architecturally forced to throw out compliance with lots of fancy newfangled dynamic stuff, why not focus on readability and page navigation usability instead?

(I led the Opera Mini team at Opera until last year.)

Great work!. I remember using it on a nokia long ago - worked well, even with the big limitations of the hardware.

Why haven't anybody managed to copy that feature well?

Opera Mobile also has great text-reflow, which makes it much more usable than other mobile browsers in my mind. The approach taken by other mobile browsers for desktop websites often yield pretty bad results, and some sites (such as hackernews) are consistently broken.