Facebook, as it existed on the desktop, was a nightmare. The blue-and-white interface was heavy. The news feed was infinite. The chat was real-time. On a cheap Nokia, it was unusable.
In 2015, Facebook released Facebook Lite , an official app that did exactly what Opera Mini did: it compressed data, worked on 2G, and used a proxy. It was faster and more integrated (push notifications, camera access). Users migrated. operamini facebook
In the history of the internet, some partnerships are accidental. Others are forged in boardrooms. But the relationship between Opera Mini and Facebook was born out of a specific, urgent necessity: the need for speed on painfully slow networks. Facebook, as it existed on the desktop, was a nightmare
And Facebook was the destination that made the journey worthwhile. The chat was real-time
This is the story of how a Norwegian browser company and a Californian social network accidentally built the on-ramp to the internet for over a billion people. To understand the magic, you must understand the pain. In the late 2000s, smartphones were expensive luxuries. Most people used "feature phones"—Nokia bricks, Samsung flip phones, or BlackBerry curves. Data plans were measured in megabytes (not gigabytes), and 2G (or EDGE) networks were the standard.
Cheap Android phones (sub-$100) flooded emerging markets. These phones had real browsers (Chrome, UC Browser) and native Facebook apps. The native app was heavy, but the phones had 1GB of RAM and 4G data.