jig Browser

» see br.jig.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The launch broke. jig.jp put the browser out in October 2004 for docomo and au handsets and more people came for it than the company had planned for, so the servers went down under the load. New users had to be put on a waiting list to get in. That is the first entry on jig.jp's own farewell timeline, and it is where the company chose to start.

What they had decided was that a phone should see i-mode pages. Sites written for i-mode, served and billed through the operator. jig Browser was a Java application you downloaded onto the handset, and it showed you the actual web, the pages built for desktop computers, on a screen a few centimeters across with a keypad underneath it. The company's own summary of what made it work lists its data compression and its fast scrolling, which is a polite description of a very hard constraint problem: the handset could not hold a modern web page, so the work had to happen somewhere else before the bytes arrived.

Nothing shaped like this was buyable where I was. A third-party browser sold by subscription, listed on the operator's own menu and charged to the phone bill, needs a carrier willing to retail software it did not write. Turkish operators used that channel for ringtones.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ a hole in the walled garden ~

The expansion reads like somebody methodically taking the fence apart. A browser-free web version arrived in March 2005 so there was nothing to install at all. Vodafone support came in February 2006, which put it on all three Japanese carriers. In May 2006 version 7 shipped jiglet, a plugin format that let users extend the browser themselves. By November 2007 SoftBank had made it the first officially sanctioned PC-site browsing app on its own phones, streaming video and audio included.

Then the versions start sounding like desktop software. Version 9 in October 2008 rebuilt the interface and added Flash. Version 10 in December 2010 ran a rendering engine jig.jp had written itself and pushed JavaScript support far enough that the company claimed a serious jump in how faithfully PC sites came out. A stripped-down jigブラウザLite followed in October 2011, aimed at anyone trying a full browser for the first time.

~ 2004.10.1 to 2026.3.31 ~

docomo gave notice on 29 October 2019 that FOMA and i-mode would both stop on 31 March 2026. jig.jp's own FAQ puts the consequence without decoration: the operating base for jig Browser disappeared, so the service ended. The app cannot be run. Registered personal data was deleted under the company's privacy policy.

The farewell page carries the span as a single line at the top, 2004.10.1 to 2026.3.31, and the cumulative figure for the whole series, 9,260,000 users. At the foot of the page the copyright runs 2004 to 2026.

~ back to Sabae ~

jig.jp was founded in May 2003 in Sabae, in Fukui prefecture, and never moved. Sabae makes eyeglasses, and has made most of Japan's domestic frames for roughly a hundred years. A software company starting there in 2003 to work on the mobile internet was an odd thing in an odd place.

The farewell page spends its last third on what the company does now, which is a live streaming service called Fuwatch alongside a pair of AR smart glasses launched in December 2025 under the name SABERA, from Sabae plus era, built with a local frame maker and an optics firm. A company that spent twenty-one years squeezing the web onto a screen too small for it is now in the eyeglass trade, in the town that was already in the eyeglass trade when it got there.

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