Opera Mini is a web browser designed primarily for mobile phones, but also for smartphones and personal digital assistants. It uses the Java ME platform and consequently requires that the mobile device be capable of running Java ME applications. Opera Mini is offered free of charge, supported through a partnership between its developer, the Opera Software company, and the search engine company Google.

Opera Mini was derived from the Opera web browser for personal computers, which has been publicly available since 1996. Opera Mini began as a pilot project in 2005. After limited releases in Europe, it was officially launched worldwide on January 24, 2006.

Opera Mini requests web pages through the Opera Software company's servers, which process and compress them before relaying the pages back to the mobile phone. This compression process makes transfer time about two to three times faster, and the pre-processing smooths compatibility with web pages not designed for mobile phones.

About 40 million mobile phones have shipped with a copy of Opera Mini pre-installed. Opera Mini's overall market share compared with other web browsers, both desktop and mobile, is about 0.06%.

History

Opera Mini was derived from the Opera web browser for personal computers, which has been publicly available since 1996. Opera Mini was originally designed for mobile phones that would ordinarily be incapable of running a web browser. It was first introduced on August 10, 2005 as a pilot project in cooperation with the Norwegian television station TV 2. At that time, Opera Mini was only available to TV 2 customers.

A beta version was made available in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland on October 20, 2005. After the final version was launched in Germany on November 10, 2005, and quietly released to all countries through the Opera Mini website in December, the browser was officially launched worldwide on January 24, 2006.

On May 3, 2006 Opera Mini 2.0 was released. It included new features such as the ability to download files, new custom skins, additional search engine options on the built-in search bar, a speed dial feature, and new search engines, and improved navigation.

On November 1, 2006 Opera Mini 3 beta introduced secure browsing, RSS feeds, photo uploading and content folding into its list of features and capabilities. Content folding works by folding long lists such as navigation bars into a single line that can be expanded as needed. A second beta was released on November 22, and on November 28, the final version of Opera Mini 3 was released.

November 7, 2007 saw the release of Opera Mini 4. According to Johan Schön, technical lead of Opera Mini development, "the entire code" was rewritten. Opera Mini 4 includes the ability to view web pages similar to a desktop based browser by introducing Overview and Zoom functions, as well as a landscape view setting. In Overview mode, the user can scroll a zoomed out version of certain web pages. Using a built-in mouse cursor, the user can zoom into a portion of the page to provide a clearer view; this is similar to the functionality of Opera's Nintendo-based web browsers. This version also includes the ability to sync with the personal computer edition of Opera.