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With Opera 10 one of the new features that was revealed was a “turbo” mode that sits in the bottom-left corner of the status bar, and is represented by a little speedometer. What is it? Opera Turbo promises fast browsing when you’re on a slow Internet connection by pushing your requests through Opera’s servers, and making them do the hard work so that the content you’re fetching is delivered in a highly compressed format:
Opera Turbo is a server-side optimization and compression technology that speeds up data transfer and reduces the amount of data that needs to be downloaded in order to view the page by up to 80%. Among other means, the compression is achieved by image down-sampling therefore some level of distortion in graphics may occur.
When I tell people about this feature the common thing I’m asked is “when will this be useful?” After all, these days we’re all surrounded by high-speed connections, and saving a few megabytes doesn’t matter too much. This kind of thing makes sense on a mobile device, and that’s why Opera Mini also makes use of it, but when would you use it on a desktop browser?
I’ve actually found Opera Turbo to be unbelievably handy… when I’m tethering with my phone. My Internet connection isn’t always as fast as I would like it to be, and I’m more than willing to compromise the quality of some images so that my pages will load faster. Plus, I can turn it on/off at the click of a button if I need to.
How much of a difference does it make? On average I’d say that I save about 1MB for each site that I load, but sometimes it’s even more than that. On sites like Yahoo.com and ESPN.com I’ll save upwards of 2MB since they are heavier on graphics. And, to be honest, the graphics are a bit pixelated, but it normally doesn’t detract from the experience I have on any one particular site. When being tethered on my phone saving that 2MB typically means the page loads five or even ten seconds quicker, and is a worthwhile tradeoff in my eyes.
I haven’t made Opera 10 my primary browser, but thanks to the Opera Turbo this is hands-down my browser of choice when I’m not hooked up to a reliably fast Internet connection. If you ever find yourself in a similar situation you may want to consider grabbing Opera 10 for your machine as well.
Opera 10 Turbo is a massive boon for people in the 3rd world. I am one ofmillions of users that have poor connections and pay by the megabyte. It saves me a lot of money and makes my user experience a heck of a lot better.
its a bless for ppl of 3rd world country like me where our connection speed is onlyyy 128kb.
Weren’t people up in arms about this when Google did it? Google Web Accelerator, anyone?
I remember using Google Web Accelerator, but I think this does a much better job. And I don’t believe it actually compressed images… I think it was mostly text compression that it was using to try and shave off time.
Google web accelerator used caching instead of compression.
Onspeed ( [onspeed.com] ) also provides a similar service. It has better compression algo than Opera (and supports Flash). But, its not free.
i’ve been an opera user since the late 90’s. i really find this new feature useful eventhough i have a fast connection. i turn this feature on when i have lots of downloads especially torrents (which really eats up most of your bandwidth). i don’t mind much the pixelated images and flash animations are also disabled when this feature is on so its a plus for me, since most flash on website are only ads anyways.
I think this is a fantastic option, especially when using GPRS in a less developed country.
However, the whole proxy issue may lead to privacy concerns, which is why I only use Turbo (or Opera Mini) when accessing static info.
There is definitely a privacy argument since all requests are going through Opera’s servers, but that’s why their desktop browser is nice. You can turn the feature on when browsing sites you don’t care about, and turn it off when you’re doing things that you don’t want going through their servers.