ibisBrowser

» see ibis.ne.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

A Japanese feature phone in 2005 could reach the internet, but only the part of it the carrier had arranged. Pages written for i-mode and billed to the phone. ibisBrowser was one of the applications that went around this, and the way it did it was to not really be a browser at all. You installed a small Java applet. The applet talked to a machine ibis owned, and that machine fetched the actual page and sent it back chewed down to something a handset could hold. The rendering happened in a data center. Your phone received the consequences.

It opened on 21 June 2005 as a free beta for docomo's FOMA handsets and went paid later that year, at three hundred and fifteen yen a month or three thousand for a year, taken by card or through the wallet chip in the phone. The free tier survived as a daily page allowance, five pages on one product and ten on the other, which is a strange unit to meter a web browser in and tells you how expensive each page was to serve.

By June 2006 the company was reporting one and a third million page views a day, up from about two hundred thousand in January. The detail from that same document worth keeping is who was doing the viewing: roughly a third of the users did not use a personal computer at all, and around nine in ten of them were under forty. ibis had built a browser for the desktop web and sold it largely to people with no desktop.

~ the case file ~

~ the cheaper bucket ~

The reason anyone paid for this was an accounting reason rather than a technical one. au handsets already had a full browser built in, called PC Site Viewer, and using it put your traffic into a billing tier that ran up to 5,985 yen a month even if you were on the flat-rate plan. ibisBrowser was a Java application, so its traffic was billed as ordinary application data and capped at 4,410. The company advertised the arithmetic directly: up to 1,575 yen a month better off.

Subtract the 315 yen ibis charged and the customer was still ahead. A third-party browser, bought on a subscription, cost less to run than the free one already sitting in the phone's menu, purely because the carrier had priced the two kinds of packet differently. That gap was the entire market, and nobody at ibis pretended otherwise.

~ thirty kilobytes, and a hundred ~

There were two products for most of the life of this thing, DX and LT, and the difference between them was not features in any meaningful sense. docomo capped how large an i-appli could be. The 90X series of handsets could run a hundred-kilobyte application; the 70X series could only take thirty. So ibis built the browser twice, once at each size, and gave the two builds different names.

One other period detail belongs here, because it would end a company now. The encryption on the paid product covered the link between ibis's relay server and the website you were visiting. It did not cover the link between your handset and ibis. Everything you browsed arrived at their machine in the clear and left it in the clear, and the spec sheet said so plainly, as a feature description rather than a confession. Transport encryption on the phone side came later.

~ retired, not switched off ~

On 4 June 2020 ibis posted a notice saying the apps would stop on 30 September, new purchases would end a month before that, and subscriptions would cancel themselves so nobody had to do anything. The stated reason was that with the move from handsets to smartphones, the company considered that ibisBrowser had finished its role. No carrier forced this. docomo kept FOMA and i-mode alive until March 2026, sixty-six months past the day ibis turned the lights off.

That is the whole difference between ibisBrowser and jig Browser, the rival it spent fifteen years next to. jig carried its browser all the way to 31 March 2026 and lost it to the network's own shutdown. ibis looked at a product that still worked and still had years of network left under it, and decided it was done. The company spent the time it bought on a drawing app called ibisPaint, which has since passed five hundred million downloads, and listed on the Tokyo exchange in March 2023. The relay servers that used to fetch web pages for people without computers are not mentioned anywhere on the current site.

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