Opera offers Turbo to speed up slow Web browsing

Browser maker Opera Software has released a test version of software called Opera Turbo, designed to use compression and the company's own servers to speed browsing over slow Internet connections.

Opera Turbo is useful when grappling with overtaxed wireless networks, slower broadband wireless cards, or Net connections through a mobile phone, the company said.

(Credit: Opera)

Opera Turbo runs on a person's PC, fetching data not just from the original Web site but also from an Opera server that compresses that site's text and images on the fly, Opera's Roberto Mateu said in a Friday blog post about Opera Turbo.

That's useful when grappling with overtaxed wireless networks, slower broadband wireless cards, or Net connections through a mobile phone, the Norwegian company said, recommending that people test Opera Turbo with connections in the range of networks transferring data at about 100Kbps.

The compression can shrink the data by up to 80 percent, according to Opera's video explanation, in part because it modifies image files.

"Web sites' layout and text will look exactly the same, but image resolution may appear considerably lower, as a result of the compression," Mateu said in the post.

More elaborate Web sites that use advanced JavaScript techniques and Adobe's Flash technology, however, might require manual intervention to work via Opera Turbo. "Dynamic Web technologies such as Ajax and Flash are supported, but some plug-in content will load only after clicking on the empty element," he said. Encrypted sites aren't accelerated or sent through the Opera servers.

The Turbo software is available from the Opera Labs download site but will be included in "future desktop versions" of Opera, Mateu said.

[missingxtension2]

Why is this news?<br />Netzero and other dial up providors have been turbocharging for years, Google already has it up and running on Firefox and IE for a long long time. Opera has been doing it in the mini version for a while.<br />It must be a slow news day.

[Shankland]

I don't think NetZero et al compressed the images. You can only get so much out of text compression. Showing coarse-resolution images is new to me. Also, i think it's interesting that Opera is taking upon itself to offer this--how many servers and network capacity will they need if this catches on widely?<br /><br />I think Google's rival technology, Google Web Accelerator, didn't use image compression, but rather prefetching. It's discontinued at any rate: http://webaccelerator.google.com/<br /><br />Then there are secondary issues I didn't get into--liability for copyright infringement since they're changing images? Should there be standards for this sort of technology?

[darthvador365]

I actually tried the Opera Turbo. I have dial-up, so I've figured it's worth a try, and it's ONLY worth a try for right now. This is a test (Alpha?) version, so there will be some issues. The only complaints I've got is that it messes up the Facebook profile pages a little bit with the javascript (homepage - ok). There are some other javascript issues, but I'm not sure if this is relevant to Opera Turbo or Opera 10, which are both test versions.