Blazer

~ the goodbye ~

The Treo was an expensive American business phone, sold mostly on Sprint and Cingular contracts, and in Turkey that put it somewhere between rare and theoretical. Blazer came free with every single one of them, which is the reason almost nobody here ever laid eyes on it and the reason it had millions of users anyway.

Bluelark Systems built the first version and released it in November 2000 for Palm OS 3.1 and later. Handspring bought Bluelark that December, which is how the browser became Handspring's and then Palm's after the two companies merged in 2003. Version 1 rendered HTML as well as WAP and i-mode, which tells you how unsettled the mobile web still was when it arrived.

It ran on the Treo 180, then the 600, the 650, the 680, the 700p and the 755p, and on the handhelds that were not phones too: the Tungsten E2, the T5, the TX, the LifeDrive. Version 2 in early 2002 added SSL and sixteen-bit color. Version 3 dropped Palm's own renderer for the NetFront engine from ACCESS. Version 4 brought VPN support and the ability to save a file. Version 4.5 arrived in May 2006 with streaming video through Kinoma Player, and that was the last one anybody wrote.

Palm shipped the Centro in October 2007 with Palm OS 5.4.9, the final release of the operating system, and Blazer 4.5 sitting on top of it. On 11 February 2009 Palm's chief executive Ed Colligan told analysts there would be no more Palm OS devices beyond carrier variants of the Centro already in the pipeline, and that the company's future was webOS. The Pre shipped that June with a WebKit browser. Blazer's platform was being wound down in the stores while its last version was still the current one.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the proxy trick ~

The thing Blazer is actually remembered for is that it did most of its work somewhere else. Your request went out to a transcoding proxy run by Palm, which fetched the page, stripped it down, reflowed it for a narrow screen, recompressed the images and sent back something small enough to arrive over a connection measured in tens of kilobits. Tables got flattened into one column. Large images got thrown away entirely.

Later releases let you switch the behavior. Blazer 4.3 added a fast mode toggle, and you could point the browser at pages directly if you wanted fidelity more than speed. Opera Mini built an entire business on the same idea and kept it running for another decade, on hardware far cheaper than a Treo, which is the version of this architecture that actually reached Turkey.

~ the treo years ~

For about four years in the middle of the decade the Treo was the phone that email-driven professionals in the United States carried, and Blazer was what opened when a link arrived in one of those emails. The screen was 320 by 320 pixels. The keyboard was physical and small. Pages came down one column deep and you scrolled through them for a long time.

It was good enough that reviewers mostly stopped complaining about it, which was unusual for a mobile browser then. Its competition was Pocket Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile and the Openwave WAP browsers on feature phones, and it beat both of them on the only measure anyone cared about, which was whether an ordinary web page arrived at all.

~ the handoff ~

ACCESS had bought PalmSource in 2005 and owned the NetFront engine underneath Blazer, so that engine kept going in other handsets for years afterward. Palm went the other way and built the webOS browser on WebKit, the same engine Apple had put in Mobile Safari in 2007. That decision settled the proxy argument for the mainstream: once the phone in your hand had the processor to render a real page, the proxy in the middle was just latency.

Blazer was never ported to webOS and never opened up. The source belonged to companies that had stopped caring about it by 2009, and no community formed around a browser that had only ever arrived preinstalled. The only way to see it now is an emulator, or a Treo that still takes a charge.

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