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How Good is Opera Turbo?

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.