back to article Opera promises netbook and mobile Turbo boost

Opera Software's browser-boosting Turbo technology has been released for limited testing, with a view to boosting the web experience on netbooks and mobile phones. The company claimed Opera Turbo could improve web surfing speeds by a factor of four. Opera Turbo does this by sending pages to the company's own servers first, …

COMMENTS

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  1. Mark
    Coat

    And for an Alpha product..

    it works extremely well. It's sometimes dumb about whats a public server and whats a private server (I could not access my router with Turbo enabled), but it's otherwise working pretty well, and does what it says on the tin.

    Expect Google, Mozilla and Apple to be introducing similar features a couple of years from now (as usual).

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Sounds a lot like this O2 EDGE* connection I'm using

    which compresses the life out of images in an effort to make the browsing experience seem marginally faster, inserting some extra code to allow one to pull the original down at will.

    * it's supposed to be 3G, but apparently that's a bit too difficult in the middle of London. No, I am not on an iPhone

  3. Toastan Buttar

    Yet Another Content Compressor

    Skweezer, OnSpeed and their ilk have been offering this kind of service for ages.

  4. Dan

    Nice

    Never mind lo-tech phones in emerging markets, I'd use this on the iphone in the UK.

  5. TimNevins

    Onspeed RIP

    I can see this as killing OnSpeeds business model as they currently charge for this.

    However poor image resolution may swing it a little bit back in OnSpeeds favor.

  6. CC
    Black Helicopters

    It definitely does work...so far, but is the Opera aggrivation worth it?

    In typical Opera fashion, 10.001 does open pages faster and in my case 50% would not be over stating the increase with my 1.5meg by 384 service.

    Unfortunately it is still a love hate relationship as Opera is still too site fussy to be remotely considered a main stream browser, so again like with all their unique and forward looking innovations they have come up with they continue to overlook the core problem and that is still and always will be their bull headed insistence on sticking to their mystical standards which again muck things up for Opera with the typical Opera result, you go know where fast.

    This Turbo idea is neat but not new as there are other Proxy sites that do the same thing if you want filtered internet, so will use it for what I can knowing Opera's inherent limitations and continue using FF as my main browser unless I need some aggravation, then I will use Opera.

  7. Bod

    No need on netbooks

    Even if you're unlucky enough to get a slow GPRS connection on a dongle, you can still load normal web pages in reasonable time. There's no need for server caching and rewriting (breaking) of web sites to render on a netbook.

    The primary reason for slowness on a mobile is down to the speed of the phone itself and the browser, not the network connection. Plus a big reason for content rewriting is to modify for such a small display. Most netbooks have a display sufficient for "full" Internet browsing.

    Of course Opera must stand to profit from it somewhere (through advertising or some sneaky analysis of their caches to flog to marketing companies etc).

    Personally I still don't trust them for the same reason I don't just MS with IE. It's not open source.

    And for a netbook, Chrome is definitely the best browser due to simplicity and maximum real estate (with Safari 4 close behind, though it has some pointless eye candy bolted on).

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ??Opera aggrivation???

    I havn't come across a website that doesn't work in Opera but does work in Firefox in a VERY long time. Sure I come across an occasional site that does not work in anything but IE, but then that's what Operas Right Click, Open With... Internet Explorer shortcut is for. I use it on the odd occasion, but rarely .

    The speed of Opera even without Turbo is impressive, the lack of continuous memory gobbling that Firefox does is a very good reason to run Opera in my eyes, the security nightmare of extensions another (why have extensions, when Opera has almost all the useful ones already included).

  9. Schultz

    Opera aggrivation???

    I am happy with my music!

  10. CC

    My Bad, Opera Aggrivation

    Well, it turned out that the speed increase I had noted was not from Opera but from my ISP who had just finished activating some new repeaters in their system.

    Operas non Turbo speed was good but the Turbo addition (now that Opera Turbo is actually turned on) actually slowed things down and the graphic quality took a heavy hit while Flash application simply do not work as well.

    So, with that all I can say is just more of the same old same old from Opera, now back to the real world and FF.

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