BOLT Browser

» see boltbrowser.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The category was real here even though this product was not. Around 2009 mobile data in Turkey was metered and it was not cheap, and the phone most people were carrying had a browser that could not open anything built for a desktop. So the proxy browsers had an actual argument, they cut your bill and they made pages work that otherwise did not. i was on the winner of that fight rather than this one. Opera Mini took Turkey and it took most places outside the United States, and BOLT is the competitor I only really looked into much later.

It came from Bitstream, which is a company you have used without knowing it. they made typefaces, they had been doing it since 1981, and Bitstream Vera is sitting in a great many Linux installs to this day. The mobile browser was a second act, following an earlier attempt of theirs called ThunderHawk. Private beta on 15 january 2009, public beta announced a month later at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, first commercial release that october.

And the thing was genuinely good at the job it had. It ran on ordinary Java ME handsets, the kind with a numeric keypad and a screen you would now consider an insult, and it opened real websites on them. Tabs arrived in the 2.0 beta in march 2010. HTML video followed that may, on phones that had no business playing video at all.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it worked ~

Almost none of the work happened on your phone. What you installed was a thin client. When you asked for a page, the request went to Bitstream's servers, where a full WebKit engine fetched it and laid it out properly. What came back down to the handset was a compressed rendering of the finished result. The compression could reach twenty four to one on a good day.

which is why it worked at all. The handset was never asked to parse the HTML or run the JavaScript or hold the layout in memory, because it did not have the memory. It was asked to display a picture and pass your taps back upstream. every browser of this class made the same bargain, and it was a good bargain in 2009 when the phone was weak and the network was expensive.

~ the unraveling ~

The bargain has a cost that is obvious the moment you look at it. Everything you browse goes through somebody else's computer. For an encrypted page the proxy has to terminate the connection at its own end and re-encrypt whatever it sends you afterward, which means the padlock in the corner is telling you about a link that does not go where you think it goes. in fairness, this was said out loud at the time and the whole category shipped anyway, because the alternative on that hardware was not browsing.

The other crack was the invoice. Rendering the web for a million people is not a fixed cost, it grows with every install. And BOLT was free the entire time it existed. so each new user made the server bill larger and the revenue did not move. Opera survived the same math by being enormous and by selling deals to carriers. Bitstream was a type foundry with a browser attached.

~ how it actually ended ~

On 10 november 2011 Monotype Imaging announced it was buying Bitstream's font business, all cash, fifty million dollars. That was the part anyone in the industry cared about, MyFonts and WhatTheFont were the assets in the room. The browser was not in the deal. Its condition was that Bitstream first spin the mobile browsing operation and the variable data publishing business out into a separate company, which became Marlborough Software Development Holdings.

That separate company had one obvious first move. On 12 december 2011 the discontinuation went out, and the wording was as plain as these notices get: economic circumstances prevented them from running a free service going forward. Two days later, on the fourteenth, the proxy servers went off and every copy of BOLT still installed on a phone anywhere stopped being a browser. The client on its own could not render a page. It never could.

Marlborough started trading in march 2012, the Monotype merger closed the same month, and the thin client is the detail worth keeping. A browser you had already downloaded, sitting on hardware you owned, was switched off from a building in Massachusetts because a font deal needed a cleaner balance sheet. i missed this one at the time. Reading it back, the piece that stayed with me is not the shutdown, it is that nobody who owned a copy could do anything about it.

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