On Symbian phones there is the Opera Mini browser which works together with a server by Opera that transcodes all web pages into a proprietary markup language that is low in requirements in bandwidth and cpu on the smartphone side. Worked great for years. But lately Opera Mini's transcoding server has been intentionally crippled by Microsoft, who now owns Opera.

However there is another old browser for symbian that works alright except it does not support certain new web page features.

Is there any software for linux that will transcode web pages so modern features are rendered on a linux server and the smartphone browser need only display the results?

What is your information based on? Opera was sold to Chinese Kunhoo LLC two years ago and I can't find neither any evidences nor rumors that it was resold to Microsoft.

Opera Mini works fine for me, I use it every day, and even today. What do you mean by crippling? Well, it has a growing number of issues with websites rendering as Presto engine that transcoders are based on is abandoned for years, that is definitely not intentional. It does not properly support even such a widely used now thing as flexboxes, so websites using flexboxes are expanded horizontally even in mobile view. Also, it's a common situation that modern web developers use newest APIs without checking if they are supported by a browser, so even thoughtless accessing localStorage may break the whole script. If you have minor issues on some sites, try to contact their developers, such things usually are easily fixed, especially if you provide a detailed bugreport. I successfully did it several times. However, dealing with SPAs that are not rendered in OM at all and don't even have an SSR fallback, at least for crawling by search engines other than Google, is totally hopeless.

But what you mentioned is definitely useful too, as proprietary services are not eternal. I thought about it for several years and came to some outlines. Now I'm rarely messing with WebkitGTK, mostly for other goal, but keeping this idea in mind, especially if it would reach the community of potential users and volunteer developers.

I know what you are talking about. Guess it would be possible to grab some web page and then format it to some form like Opera and some others have done before. As to how exactly I have never tried it but I assume it could be performed. Opera had a huge cache of web pages ready to toss at us. You'd have to also grab a ton or just wait for the conversion.

Where to start I can't say. Look at maybe the tutorials on how to convert web pages to mobile for clues to start. I guess it's possible that the old opera info is online some place.

There were articles a while ago about Microsoft buying the Opera Browser. Apparently it has not worked out. Maybe your version of Opera Mini has no intentional issues, but my 7.1.32453 version definitely has. You click on a link or type a url or type a search term and sometimes it goes into ??? mode: it shows you one of the recent pages you have visited instead. You try again and it shows another recent page. And again and again. Either you give up or you try a little later and it may work then. Clearing the cookies and history and powering off the phone makes no difference. Neither does changing to a wifi isp. It has been having these fits for years... hasn't anyone seen anything yet? Of course they have. It makes you think about about dumping your phone and getting a new one. Bingo.

Now that you say Opera has been bought by the Chinese, one more reason to say goodbye, albeit a different one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/operabrowse...n_brick_still/

Let's pretend we do not want to use closed-source ever again. Can we go back to the drawing board with something like VNC on a java canvas inside a browser window, or something like that but faster?

Approximately in 2005 year there was a lot of articles that Microsoft is going to buy Yahoo!. So is Yahoo! acquired now? Looks more like a client bug, not a transcoder one. Did you try totally wiping application data, not just clearing from OM settings? Does it happen with other versions, does it happen to both J2ME/SIS?Is this based on something or just guessing?Well, the phone may be a culprit here too. If the flash memory is dying and read/write operations do not always complete successfully, there may happen any strange glitches. Also there may be OS bugs and accumulated errors that indirectly affect OM, flashing the phone may be a good idea.
There is a J2ME VNC client, I successfully used it to connect to X11 session on my server. But it is slightly usable on unstable connection. What you're telling about is similar to how does Puffin browser for spadephones work. Such a solution may be even better for means of interactivity than transcoding to dumb markup, but only with stable connection, otherways client would stay with a totally static snapshot of the page until the connection will restore. So probably the best solution would be something intermediate or hybride.

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The way Opera worked was that the browser was pointing to the Opera servers that has already transcoded the web pages. It would get choked up as they didn't have near the world wide network speed that was needed.

Yes, you might be able to use some sort of remote desktop on a phone attached to your home computer to send simple display presentation.