Nokia Xpress (also called Xpress Browser) was a

mobile browser A mobile browser is a web browser designed for use on a mobile device such as a mobile phone or PDA. Mobile browsers are optimized to display Web content most effectively on small screens on portable devices. Mobile browser software must be smal ...

developed by

Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications industry, telecommunications, technology company, information technology, and consumer electronics corporatio ...

and supported by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

until the end of 2015. It came loaded by default with

Series 40 Series 40, often shortened as S40, is a software platform and application user interface (UI) software on Nokia's broad range of mid-tier feature phones, as well as on some of the Vertu line of luxury phones. It was one of the world's most wi ...

Asha Platform The Nokia Asha platform is a mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for low-end borderline smartphones, based on software from Smarterphone which was acquired by Nokia. The platform inherits UI similarities mostly from MeeG ...

and Nokia X Software Platform. It uses the

Gecko rendering engine Gecko is a browser engine developed by Mozilla. It is used in the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client, and many other projects. Gecko is designed to support open Internet standards, and is used by different applications to display web p ...

. On Nokia feature phones it was replaced by Opera browser in early 2015.

About

Nokia Xpress Browser uses intermediate Nokia proxy servers to optimize web pages based on the capabilities and screen size of the device. The

proxy servers In computer networking, a proxy server is a server application that acts as an intermediary between a client (computing), client requesting a Web resource, resource and the server providing that resource. Instead of connecting directly to a ...

also compress data to reduce data transmission charges for the mobile user. The browser was released for Lumia devices in 2012.

Privacy

Like the

Opera Mini Opera Mini is a mobile web browser made by Opera. It was primarily designed for the Java ME platform, as a low-end sibling for Opera Mobile, but it is now developed exclusively for Android. It was previously developed for iOS, Windows 10 Mobil ...

, the Nokia Xpress browser decrypts and compresses

HTTPS Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It is used for secure communication over a computer network, and is widely used on the Internet. In HTTPS, the communication protocol is enc ...

traffic, routing it through Nokia's own servers. This practice seeks to provide faster browsing for users of feature phones and smartphones with lower

processing power In computing, computer performance is the amount of useful work accomplished by a computer system. Outside of specific contexts, computer performance is estimated in terms of accuracy, efficiency and speed of executing computer program instruction ...

(and thus lower bills for less mobile data usage). However, as pointed out by researcher Gaurang K. Pandya, this raises serious privacy concerns, because Nokia is essentially "performing

Man In The Middle Attack In cryptography and computer security, a man-in-the-middle, monster-in-the-middle, machine-in-the-middle, monkey-in-the-middle, meddler-in-the-middle, manipulator-in-the-middle (MITM), person-in-the-middle (PITM) or adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) ...

for sensitive HTTPS traffic" and temporarily decrypting user data—which could be sensitive financial information, passwords. The company admitted to the technical details, but stated, "Claims that we would access complete unencrypted information are inaccurate". ''

GigaOm Gigaom is a technology focused analyst firm and media company. The company evolved from a blog which offered news, analysis, and opinions on startup companies, emerging technologies, and other technology related topics. It was started by Om Malik ...

'' criticized Nokia, which, unlike the Opera Mini, has failed to make it clear that HTTPS traffic will be decrypted during transit. It recommended that Nokia learn from Amazon's Silk browser, which leaves HTTPS traffic unperturbed.

User agent

The Xpress Browser reports the following user agents:User-Agent headers for Nokia devices - Nokia Developer Wiki
Developer.nokia.com. Retrieved on 2013-08-21. Nokia Lumia, Nokia 311:

Mozilla/5.0 (Series40; Nokia311/03.81; 
Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1) Gecko/20100401 
S40OviBrowser/2.2.0.0.31

Nokia X3-02:

Mozilla/5.0 (Series40; NokiaX3-02/le6.32; 
Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1) Gecko/20100401 
S40OviBrowser/2.0.2.62.10

Nokia 225:

Mozilla/5.0 (Series30Plus; Nokia225/20.10.11;
Profile/Series30Plus Configuration/Series30Plus) Gecko/20100401
S40OviBrowser/3.8.1.2.0612

References

External links

XpressBrowser for Series 40

Windows Phone page at Beta Labs

Download for Windows Phone
{{Nokia services Mobile web browsers Nokia services

About

Privacy

User agent

See also

References

External links