[rntksi]

I remember this being done back when Opera 7 was used. I think it had a feature for mobile OS, where it would route requests to Opera's servers and serve clients a minified, smaller version of the page, so people on 2G at the time could still use the web. I don't remember people being outraged at the time at the prospect of a browser having a baked-in VPN option though.

[noja]

Yes that was mainly because mobile internet was really slow and using it without Opera's proxy was an exercise in frustration.

But do not forget that Opera 7 was release TWENTY YEARS AGO. Things are a bit different now. Think eternal september.

[bityard]

I remember this as well and thought it was a neat service. One that I would have liked to emulate using my own proxy in order to save bandwidth on my mobile data but never got around to actually doing.

These days with widespread HTTPS, the only way to do this is to bake it into the browser itself.

And of course, this was back when you could trust Opera to do what they said they were (or weren't) doing.

[int_19h]

That was Opera Mini, and it's still around (and popular in areas where Internet speed is still measured in Kbps and/or you pay for data per megabyte).

It's not even that it served a minified version, too. It basically did all layout server-side, so the client got something more akin to a PDF of the webpage optimized for its screen size. It also compressed images.

[laundermaf]

Don't forget about Google’s own "optimizer"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Accelerator

[Nextgrid]

At the time, spyware was not yet a mainstream business model so there was no outrage because respectable, established companies didn't yet become spyware operators. There was still mutual trust back in the day.

[sergiotapia]

God I miss Presto and Dragonfly. :'(