What was innovative about the browser that wasn't already available on Sony Ericsson phones with Opera Mini since 2005? The UI was a little different and polished but also not that new. I still don't get the hype. I had the original iPhone, found out it doesn't support apps and promptly went back to my Sony Ericsson.
Opera Mini at iPhone’s release couldn’t zoom in and out or show websites in a horizontal or vertical view etc. It also didn’t directly render websites requiring a server to provide a more limited version which caused a range of compatibility and latency issues etc.
Opera Mini was well optimized for cellphones of the time and bandwidth limited cellphone plans, but Apple’s deal with AT&T to allow unlimited bandwidth flipped a lot of those design decisions on their head. IMO what really separated the iPhone’s browser was a larger screen + better UI + better rendering + unlimited bandwidth meant it could just be used to casually browse the web.
The sever didn’t provide the full sized images on large pictures, so you couldn’t zoom in the phone simply didn’t have that information.
The iPhone was released June 29, 2007 but announced in January. “On 7 November 2007, Opera Mini 4 was released. According to Johan Schön, technical lead of Opera Mini development, the entire code was rewritten.[28] Opera Mini 4 includes the ability to view web pages similarly to a desktop based browser by introducing Overview and Zoom functions, and a landscape view setting. In Overview mode, the user can scroll a zoomed-out version of certain web pages.[29] Using a built-in pointer, the user can zoom into a portion of the page to provide a clearer view”
Back in those days extremely smooth scrolling and pinch-to-zoom was something that turned mobile web browsing from annoying hurdle to a fairly pleasant experience.
Mobile hardware wasn't capable of delivering such smoothness. Apple's innovation was to prioritize UI rendering over everything else. When you're zooming, rendering stops and browser only deals with zooming. Regardless of current CPU capabilities and load, scrolling and zooming is always smooth. And turns out people care about those way more than parallel rendering.
That's some underappreciated outside of the box thinking.
