Opera, makers of mobile web browsers popular on those platforms that don’t yet have a WebKit browser (ouch, but yeah) has announced that they’re going to show off a version of their Opera Mini proxy browser at Mobile World Congress (MWC) to partners and press.
I’m not a huge fan of proxy browsers in general — where web data is rendered on Opera’s servers, compressed, and then sent down to your phone. They remind me of those old “dial-up internet accelerators” that just cached everything locally. As broadband grew, the need for them evaporated. They also break secure connections, since they’re doing the actual web calls on their server, so things like online banking become an issue for the paranoid.
Opera makes a good point, however — for people in countries where data isn’t “unlimited” but paid-per-megabyte, or for people roaming in other countries, proxy and compression can be a big money saver.