A Blog From Behind the Trenches

Another "cloud browser" seems to have closed its doors.

WAP Review reported last week that the "Bolt" proxy browser service has been shut down due to "economic circumstances". The browser has been pulled from Android Market, and the browser's official site has been replaced by a brief text explaining the situation. Some of you may recall that I called out BitStream, the creators of Bolt, on their outlandish speed claims a couple of years ago.

There used to be a wider selection of "cloud browsers", but the list is now narrowing down considerably:

• Skyfire shut down its worldwide proxy browsing service to focus on Western markets, and today it mostly seems to work as a video/media transcoding service on top of the system default browser
• TeaShark created some initial headlines a few years ago, but apparently haven't been heard from since

The reason for this mostly seems to be that running these services is not exactly cheap, which we can definitely relate to. While Opera Mini is currently bringing in a lot of revenue, the expenses are also something we have to take into consideration. We've had to focus a lot on building efficient infrastructure, seeing as we're processing more than 86 billion pages every month!

And let's not forget that this is a highly competitive market.

Now Bolt is closing down, or at least the free service is.

But who knows, maybe they have some good engineers that would like to continue working on browsers. Remember: We're hiring!