Opera – The Best Web Browser for Slow Internet Connections

The Opera Turbo mode, a proxy that compresses web pages is certainly one of the best features of Opera, making it the perfect web-browser for those over a slow internet connection. And Opera 11.10 improved this feature significantly by replacing highly compressed JPEGs with Google’s WebP image format. As a result, the byte size of the compressed images is reduced even further without much degradation in the visual quality. The feature can also help you save money when you are on a metered Internet connection.

How it works?

When you request a web page, your browser will connect directly to the site’s servers to download all its images, text, and other associated files. However, in the case of Opera Turbo, the same request is routed to Opera servers, the web page is first downloaded on Opera servers, it is then compressed and served to you.

The content and layout of the page doesn’t change after compression though the quality of images is often reduced. But since your browser now has to download lesser number of bytes for the same web page, it will load a lot faster.

Here’s a quick overview at the comparisons between the size and the quality of a few images as served through standard Opera, Opera Turbo (JPEG compression) and new Opera Turbo with WebP-based compression.

[Via: Digital Inspiration]