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.