I think it was roughly a year ago that you implemented a "cookies never disappear" "feature" (ahem) in Opera Mini. After visiting site A and finding site A's products appearing in ads on sites B, C, D, etc. I am in the habit of clearing cookies. This has stopped working. Minutes or (at most) hours later, site A's ads magically come back. I do not take this kindly. I went so far as completely uninstalling and reinstalling Mini (which incidentally wiped out all my bookmarks), so am reasonably certain it's not a local glitch.

Fast forward to last fall, and you managed to break a number of web sites on the Mini back end. Well-known sites either don't render at all now, or certain features now no longer work. I would normally point out these issues to be helpful, But In This Case I Won't . Opera, you get as much loyalty as you give, and for all of the reasons above I now use Mini considerably less.

If you want to do right by me, revert the cookie "feature" and then go overboard on filtering large Internet content like animated GIF's and auto-playing videos. Limiting the size of web pages is one of the main reasons for Mini's existence, but your core design goes only so far with all of this other junk lurking on the web.

Do right by me and I'll do right by you. Cool?

Oh, and I guess you do know that your forums don't render properly on a mobile device...or if it can work, I haven't found the trick. The preview window to the right and (most importantly) the Discard and Submit buttons are invisible.

I'm using a recent version of Mini on an Android Oreo phone.

@leocg

Well, that's certainly my definition of customer service! Can you at least confirm that Opera Norway is aware of this thread? If they aren't interested in 1) reaching out to CDN's like Akamai and Cloudflare to explain the situation and pass this information along privately, 2) publishing it publicly, or 3) altering Mini on the back-end to hide the Netherlands IP ranges in favor of the user-local IP, then they are apparently satisfied in offering a mediocre product.

I will continue to post blocked web sites to this thread and encourage others to do so, too. Maybe when we reach 1000+ sites, Opera will finally take notice that something is wrong?

@pierro78

There are very few configuration options in Mini, so if such a setting exists, it's well hidden. FWIW I agree with you: "pull down to refresh" is the most worthless feature, especially in a browser. All it does for me is delete form data that I spent 20+ minutes entering.

A suggestion: posting here might create some empathy, but apparently the developers don't read the forums. Use the Settings -> Report a Problem option in Mini to request an off switch. Then you can be sure it actually reached the right group. I'll do the same.

@danial009

There isn't exactly, but for me all traffic routes through a proxy in the Netherlands, which does create a VPN-like effect.

@leocg

metv.com is one such example. The popups are so furious that it's very difficult to browse the site or even close the browser tab. Maybe what's needed is a cache option for user responses, so Cancel really does mean Cancel?

Incidentally, Opera Mini was originally devised a low memory, data-saving client, so we do need this feature for sites that bend over backwards to shove video streaming down our throats. More of this please, not less, but the popups are a real issue.

@danial009

There isn't exactly, but for me all traffic routes through a proxy in the Netherlands, which does create a VPN-like effect.

@pierro78

There are very few configuration options in Mini, so if such a setting exists, it's well hidden. FWIW I agree with you: "pull down to refresh" is the most worthless feature, especially in a browser. All it does for me is delete form data that I spent 20+ minutes entering.

A suggestion: posting here might create some empathy, but apparently the developers don't read the forums. Use the Settings -> Report a Problem option in Mini to request an off switch. Then you can be sure it actually reached the right group. I'll do the same.

@leocg

Well, that's certainly my definition of customer service! Can you at least confirm that Opera Norway is aware of this thread? If they aren't interested in 1) reaching out to CDN's like Akamai and Cloudflare to explain the situation and pass this information along privately, 2) publishing it publicly, or 3) altering Mini on the back-end to hide the Netherlands IP ranges in favor of the user-local IP, then they are apparently satisfied in offering a mediocre product.

I will continue to post blocked web sites to this thread and encourage others to do so, too. Maybe when we reach 1000+ sites, Opera will finally take notice that something is wrong?

Any updates? When all went silent, I got the impression that Opera was taking me seriously and working on implementing this. If you can hide one IP, I think you should be able to hide two, Then the vast majority of these problems will disappear.

@leocg

My goal in posting here was to find a way to make Mini more usable on these fussy sites...without disabling the features that keep me using Mini in the first place. All this time I'd assumed the 82.145.212.x and 82.145.211.x ranges I cited above were the backend servers powering Mini, not the (apparently well-known) filtering proxy Opera uses across a range of products. I was going to ask you to confirm my comment that

I was under the strong impression that Mini was incapable of processing .html, .js, .css, etc. files on its own.

But I found the Mini developer's guide at https://dev.opera.com/articles/opera-mini-content-authoring-guidelines/ so that's no longer important:

Third, there are browsers that use a proxy system to deliver content to the phone. In this setup, there is a client on the device that connects to a proprietary server, which then connects to the wider web for page requests, does some server-side processing and sends content back the client. Opera Mini falls into this category: when the user navigates to a new page, the server fetches the page and transforms it into a lightweight compressed binary markup language called OBML. This decreases bandwidth usage by up to 90% and saves CPU usage on mobile devices, and as such makes browsing on resource-restricted devices much more viable. It also has speed benefits, since the majority of data transfer occurs between the Mini servers and website servers, both of which are on high-speed connections.

Point of logic then. As Opera has apparently gone to great lengths to hide the IP address ranges of the actual, central servers, showing the world a user-local IP when Data Saving is disabled, it should be possible to hide the proxy server address, too. (Mini can't be making TWO outbound connections, can it?) Yes, it's probably easier to treat all Opera clients the same, but they've already shown this can be done. Hide the proxy's existence behind a user-local IP and that would be a win for users.

Comments?

@leocg

Obviously you were suggesting I change Data Savings to Off. Tap, tap, tap...

Okay, that was unexpected. The vast majority of sites I listed now don't complain, perhaps because my IP now shows as US-based. What exactly is happening here? Given the vast difference in package sizes, this can't simply be turning Mini into "Opera for Android"? I was under the strong impression that Mini was incapable of processing .html, .js, .css, etc. files on its own.

Having said that, the Data Saving feature is the main reason I use Mini, and I refuse to use any browser today without ad blocking. To give these up means I may as well move to Firefox with uBlock Origin full time. But this is could be a way to decide if the web site is causing problems because of the foreign IP or because of Mini itself, so I am happy to know this trick.

@leocg said in [Request]List of all Opera Mini IP addresses?:

@h1andy It could be due to the location or just because the site blocks VPNs and proxies.

If you can show me how to turn off the Mini VPN/proxy, then I'll be on my way. As we know that's impossible, I take it as the CDN (etc.) being sloppy. They get held to a higher standard because it's their day job. Now if knowing how Mini works, a web site still decides to block it for geographic reasons, I'm okay with that...provided they have the decency to say so. Very few do. One such site is tcm.com

@leocg said in [Request]List of all Opera Mini IP addresses?:

@tao102 I was thinking more of security and privacy when I said that Opera will not publish the list of Opera Mini servers IP addresses.

But at best, that's security through obscurity. At worst it's meaningless because I was able to deduce a rough IP range on my own with just a few minutes of work. A dedicated attacker would be much more spot on.

It's very easy to find sites that don't work. (I define that as visiting a site in Mini and experiencing some kind of hassle...up to being blocked entirely, then immediately trying Firefox, Chrome, etc. and experiencing no hassle.) Just do a web search for something (where the results are more varied than 100 Amazon links) and start clicking. I was looking for a small car part tonight and more sites failed than worked. One of the sites that worked got my business. Some examples, in no particular order:

deviantart.com
homedepot.com
stockwiseauto.com
partsgeek.com
indeed.com (intermittent)
farmstore.com
kickstarter.com (intermittent)
ziprecruiter.com
repairclinic.com
locations.monro,com
thebritishcrafthouse.co.uk
commercialsearch.com
klockit.com
blindstogo.com
commercialcafe.com
overdriveonline.com
unmask.com
fastpeoplesearch.com
bjs.com
dollargeneral.com
flowershopping.com
camelcamelcamel.com
warshows.com
parcelmonkey.com
weismarkets.com
rd.com

I noticed some sites that fail when clicking a search engine link, but work when accessed directly. Those are not included. Hopefully they're just misconfigured and will be fixed shortly.

There are at least as many other examples trapped on another currently non-functioning Android phone.

Incidentally, I found a handful of sites in my Opera Mini "log" that are pricks to many visitors, not just Mini:

ezydvd.com.au
homeboxstores.com
cof.co.il
answerpail.com
flamesmedia.ca
odeon.co.uk

As long as everybody suffers, I'm somewhat more tolerant of that.

Being a moderator here, if I can convince you there is a problem, can you help me get Opera off their backsides?

@leocg

Opera doesn't seem to be a very hands-on company anymore, so you may be right...but my request is quite legitimate, and I hope for the better angels of their nature. They should consider it an extension of their developer's kit. It would be sad if I had to reach out to Akamai personally on their (and my) behalf.

I've been taking screen shot every time a site block Mini (or seems to treat it differently), and can start uploading them here if that's needed to drive the point home. This is not an isolated problem, and I can't believe others around the world aren't affected as well.