September 1st, 2009, 6:51PM in No Category by Marc LequimeView Comments
Not the snazziest title, but this is certainly the best version of Opera to date. Opera isn’t necessarily the most popular browser — in fact, several people moan about poor speed, not helped by safari’s internet statistics page — but it also suffers from being in contact with strong competitors.
Opera’s new web browser boasts a special feature — the ability to speed up web browsing, apparently, 
with Opera Turbo. This basically compresses images and other items that usually take long to download, and makes them smaller so less download time, so faster page load. For example, PNG images have their color count reduced, while JPEG images are downloaded in incredibly low qual.
Funnily, the site kept timing out for me. Either too many people were downloading, or that’s pure irony.
It would seem that a lot of the features that Opera 10 boasts happen to be included either already in other browsers, or as incredibly popular add-ons for Firefox. Here’s a list of their new features, and the equivalents.
The thing that’s really began to grab me with this browser is the fact that if you are experiencing slow network problems, you can sacrifice quality at the sake of speed. Yes, that’s right — all images are either (in the case of PNGs) reduced to a low-color palette, as happened for TekCube.net, or if they’re using JPEG, converted to a low-quality jpeg. It’s really quite something, however. I experienced nearly tenfold the speed I usually get with Opera, although for some web-pages (especially the Opera startpage), it’s too hideous to bear. The only problem is that the speed is only a small bit faster than Firefox’s regular speed, and you’re sacrificing a lot of quality.
Comments, anyone?
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