Among the bundle of new features in Opera 10, one particular addition stands out. The ability to compress the data traffic and make your browsing experience much better on a slow internet connection. I had a chance to experience this first hand in a hotel where I was staying. The advertised “High Speed Wireless connection” used to come to a stand still during day times and I had no other option but to go elsewhere to continue working. Then I stumbled upon Opera 10.
When you enable the Turbo mode in Opera 10, it uses a proxy where all your browser requests are sent. The proxy downloads the web pages on your behalf, compresses them and sends it to your browser. Since the size of compressed data is much smaller, you get a better browsing speed. It also detects your current connection speed and increases or decreases the amount of compression accordingly. Some image quality is lost as the jpegs are re-encoded in order to reduce the size but then again it depends on your connection speed. Once you switch back to a faster connection, Opera reminds you to turn the Turbo mode off!
It appears like Opera are using the same proxy infrastructure that they are utilizing for the Opera Mini browser – which is very popular product on Java enabled handsets that do not have or have a poor quality web browser. Take Opera 10 for a spin – the other features apart from the “Turbo” are also worth having a good look at.
