Opera Turbo Speeds Desktop Browsing, but at What Cost?

opera-turbo

Opera Labs today launched a preview of the Turbo feature planned for version 10 of their desktop browser. Much like their mobile browsers, Opera uses server-side optimizations and compression technology to serve up web pages fast. They offer a video demonstration if you’re not the adventurous type that jumps on preview downloads. In it, they load the Slashdot home page: both with and without the Turbo feature running. They also limit the connection speeds to 100kbps for the demo. You can see the difference in the above screencap: Turbo is on the right and is nearly four times faster.

I consider faster browsing a good thing, but with mobile broadband speeds trending faster, is this technology a solution in search of a problem? No doubt there are some regions that can greatly benefit so I think there is a market for this, albeit a shrinking one over the long term. The other challenge is one of privacy. The typical complaint I hear with services like this is that people don’t want the provider to have browsing details or personal data. As we rely more on the cloud for data-intensive services, this “cost” be a huge barrier to adoption for Opera. The flipside for mobile browsing: compressed web data could help folks from bumping up against monthly bandwidth caps.

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