Opera has introduced a new concept called “Opera Turbo”. It is a server-side compression technique in which the Opera’s servers compress the web-pages and their elements before sending it to the client’s machine. It is axiomatic, the target market is not the people with the high broadband speeds. They won’t get much benefit out of this technology. The people who use slow internet connections and the people who are still trapped behind the slow EDGE and GPRS networks are going to the target market for the Opera.
Here is the screenshot of apothetech.com running inside the Opera Turbo. You can observe that the quality of graphics has been bumped down a lot in order to reduce the size of the overall website as much as possible.
One question that pops up on our minds whenever we hear about our data coming via third party servers is privacy. Opera promises to bypass the traffic whenever we are on SSL site. Also, they promise that they won’t be storing any information of the users.
So what does not work?
- animated GIFs do not work
- some flash content won’t work initially: You will have to click on the flash content to load it. This is a wise move by folks at Opera. Had they allowed the flash content to load automatically, it would have consumed a lot of bandwidth.
Remember the time, when every day we used to hear some browser claiming itself as the “world’s fastest web-browser”? Looks like the Opera is back in the game, at least for the people on-the-move.
Supports: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux/Unix