Vision Mobile Browser

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

~ the goodbye ~

Nobody chose Vision Mobile Browser. It turned up on your handset because an operator had signed a contract with a company in Illinois, and it was the browser you had until you bought a different phone.

Novarra released it in October 2002, which is very early for this idea. The iPhone was five years away. The mobile web at the time meant WAP, a stripped-down markup that ordinary websites did not use and that had to be authored separately by anyone who wanted to be reachable from a phone at all. Vision's pitch was that it would render the actual web, the pages written for desktop machines, on a handset running Java ME.

It could make that promise because the phone was doing almost none of the work.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the server did the work ~

Novarra's system put a machine in the middle. The handset asked for a page, a server in the network went and fetched it, and what came back down the link was a reprocessed version, compressed and reflowed for a screen a couple of inches wide, with everything the device had no way to draw already removed. Novarra's own description of the result was that full pages load in seconds thanks to compression and in-network processing of the content.

Every mobile browser that worked in that era used this architecture, and Opera Mini is the one people remember for it. The bargain never changed. You got real web pages on a device with no business rendering them, and in exchange every page you looked at went through somebody else's computer on the way.

In Turkey the proxy browser people actually met was Opera Mini, which you installed yourself and which needed nobody's permission. Vision was the other sort, sold business to business and delivered pre-loaded, close to invisible as a brand to the person actually holding the phone. I could not honestly tell you whether I ever used it, and that is the whole design.

~ the day it died ~

Version 8.00 shipped in 2009 and was the last. Nokia announced on 26 March 2010 that it was buying Novarra, and the deal closed on 9 April. Nokia was not shopping for a browser brand; it wanted the transcoding servers and the engineers who had built them, at a moment when it was losing the smartphone argument badly and still shipping enormous volumes of cheap handsets that needed exactly this trick to reach the web.

After that the usual thing happened. The technology went inside, the Vision name stopped being printed anywhere, and the line of descent runs forward through Nokia's Ovi Browser and into Nokia Xpress, which has a grave of its own here. Novarra as an independent company ended on the day the paperwork cleared.

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