Mobile Browsers: History And Evolution.

Article 1: What did it all start with?

The idea of improving, correcting navigation on the Internet from a mobile phone has emerged both for users and companies for a long time, or rather with the appearance of 1 native mobile browser in 1999.

Personally, this desire came to me from the moment of my first access to the network for the first time (in 2002), and after the appearance of my Siemens MT50 phone in 2004, with the possibility of installing Java applications, this desire only increased ... And not because, That I wanted to see the "big" Internet, and with a view to a more mundane; Speed up page processing time. Because Phone with 512 kb. Healp-memory and GPRS Class 8 pulled small black and white sites quite hard ...

True, there were also side services, like www magstar from mag, allowing through their site to watch a black and white parody on the big Web. But it was not that ...

And it all started with the development of a foreign mobile browser in Java - WebViewer .

The browser could first open the www site by processing it from its own server and breaking it into parts. To some extent, Java version of the popular service from coputermag.ru www-emulator. Naturally, navigation on mobile sites was not much better, but often worse than through a native browser. Has compressed pages, caching and history of sites. Naturally, it had MIDP 1.0 and was paid. Trial was 10 days and was limited to 5 pages a day. The full version is $ 20 (!) Per year. Naturally, WebViewer Was in English. Nevertheless, this is actually the first such browser for mobile phones. Opera Mini was not there yet ...

In the network to find the version 1.0 I could not ... All the same Internet is not a repository of history ...

The release date for the first version is April 14, 2003.

The same last 05.03.2004 year. Also on it is the first Russian-language mod SmartViewer, dated 2005.

Regarding 2003, in this year the origin of the very idea of mobile browsing, there was another browser, not known for Russian-speaking users - WebLite. Dated May 25 of the same year. True, even in those years he did not pay much attention ...

WebLite is a browser from the firmware for Nokia 6230i. And installed in some countries of Western Europe on this model. True, it was installed separately, from the main one. Something similar to modern special versions of Opera Mini.

Thus, in the distant 2003 the first third-party mobile browsers for mobile phones were born (the PDA on Windows Mobile is not taken into account, it's not mobiles.) Became prototypes of modern browsers for cellular phones and having started a huge twist in the development of the mobile Internet!

In the next article from the series "Mobile Browsers: History and Development" we'll talk about the 2nd generation browsers, which became the basis of the modern model of mobile browsing!