TeaShark

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

~ the last words ~

In 2007 a phone either had a browser or it had Java. If it had Java it could run a MIDlet, and a MIDlet could draw pixels on the screen and open a socket, which turns out to be enough to build a browser out of provided you are willing to cheat about where the rendering happens. TeaShark cheated in exactly that way and shipped in September 2007 as a free beta.

The download was 145 kilobytes and would install on more or less any handset with MIDP 2.0, which in 2007 meant more or less any handset. What you got had tabs, which the phone's own browser certainly did not, along with a session that reopened where you left it and bookmarks you could tag by color. Pages arrived looking approximately like pages instead of like a WAP deck of stripped text.

It never had much of a public identity. No company was named on the download page and no founder appears anywhere in the coverage. The only trace of origin left on the site is the asset host, a Finnish domain the images were served from. The version people ended up with was 0.419 and it stayed a beta for its entire life, which is the sort of detail that tells you roughly how many people were working on it.

~ the record ~

~ the proxy trick ~

The architecture was the whole product. TeaShark's servers ran a WebKit renderer that fetched the page and worked out its layout at your screen size, then shipped down a compressed description of the result. The handset did almost no work and, more to the point, pulled almost no bytes.

That second part is why this class of browser mattered. Mobile data in Turkey in 2007 was sold by the kilobyte on a tariff you did not want to test, and the same was true across most of the world outside a handful of flat-rate markets. A browser that cut a page down to a fraction of its real weight decided whether you opened a site at all.

~ where it actually caught on ~

India, mostly, for reasons that had little to do with the browser's merits. The Indian coverage from those years credits its popularity to Airtel Live settings that let proxy-browser traffic slip past the data meter, and TeaShark was one of the applications that got passed around for it. Every free-data trick of the era had the same shape, which was a proxy in the middle and a carrier that had not thought about it yet.

~ because mobile web is dead ~

Nobody wrote a shutdown announcement, so the front page has to serve as the death certificate, and it is unusually candid for one. At some point after 2010 a line went into the site header next to the logo: because mobile web is dead. It sat there, above a download button and a login form and a footer still reading Copyright 2008, for the last two years the site was up.

The archive has that page working on 20 April 2013. By 7 July the same address was a green-bordered parking page listing the domain for sale, and by early 2014 somebody had put a WordPress marketing blog on it. It went 404 that July, and since September 2015 it has answered with a redirect to a domain broker, where it is still listed.

What killed it was never mysterious. Opera Mini did the same server-side rendering with a far larger install base and carrier deals in the markets where both of them lived. Then the cheap Android handset showed up carrying a real browser, and the reason for the entire category went with it.

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