@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?