Video: Opera 10 promises Turbo browsing using Scandinavian flat-packing knowhow
By Thomas Ricker 
posted Sep 1st 2009 3:41AM
posted Sep 1st 2009 3:41AM
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inb4 opera fanboys
NOOOOO!! I am forever prevented from being an opera fanboy now! Much of me cries a little inside.
;_;
What happened to all the FF fanboys? Oh yeah, FireFox is a bloated piece of crap now.
Firefox does suck now. I used to use it occasionally but always preferred Safari (WebKit really, from a developer stand-point) especially since the version 4 Beta. Firefox was my very strong number 2 go-to, but now it is extremely rare that I even open Firefox at all. I generally use the webkit nightly or even Camino if I need to open another browser.
I suppose it's worth mentioning that I never cared for extensions.
In during internet hipsters.
has anyone tried it and see any noticeable difference between opera 10 and he current firefox?
Haven't tried that turbo thingie, but general performance of 10 RC is noticeably better than FF's. Javascript seems to have been fixed as well, now even Facebook doesn't suck anymore. And the new theme looks sooo nice on Mac.
If you're on a fast connection, you won't notice any speed difference. If you're on a slower connection, it's possible you'll notice something, but it's nothing dramatic. Less data is transferred, but there's increased latency due to Opera proxying everything. If you're on a netbook, where page-rendering is comparatively slow, you'll also notice very little increase in speed, unless you're using a slow cellular connection or severely bandwidth-limited Wi-Fi.
If you're on a slow connection, you will likely see a *decrease* in latency.
The Turbo stuff comes from Opera Mini, a java-based browser designed for non-smart phones (you know, with a numeric keypad). It's designed to reduce the impact of low speeds and huge latencies.
On the one hand, there is an added latency due to Opera proxying everything. However, Opera sends the entire web page down the pipe in one single package, dramatically reducing the number of round trips required to retrieve the page.
Imagine these two scenarios. First, you have a fast connection. Both you and Opera are 25ms away from the web server, and you are 25ms away from Opera. The page requires 10 round-trip requests to fully retrieve.
Latency (time spent waiting, not including transfer times):
Direct: 250ms
Opera: 275ms
Now imagine that you're on a slow connection. Dialup, for example. 200ms latency.
Direct: 2000ms
Opera: 450ms
Now how about you've got satellite broadband? Fast speeds, but probably 600ms of latency.
Direct: 6000ms
Opera: 850ms
Now, there are a lot of assumptions here, but it should give you an idea of how Opera's approach can really help in high-latency scenarios. The savings are actually quite a bit better on slower connections. This stuff was designed for 2G pre-EDGE speeds. We're talking speeds that make Dialup look fast. If you're a user stuck on dialup, this will be a huge improvement. It might not make YouTube usable, but typical web pages will load many times faster.
Satellite broadband users will also see huge improvements due to the reduction of impact in latency. The number of round-trips is reduced to one, and they've got the raw speed to make streaming stuff like YouTube work fine. There are a *lot* of satellite broadband users out there, they should eat this up.
I'm loving it. Opera Link, Turbo and all other features are (or will be) pure win when used in desktops, laptops and mobile devices.
I hope they'll soon release the Symbian / Android / Maemo versions of Opera Mobile.
(It has also, since the beta, gotten 100 on Acid3)
That's nice, but it doesn't really do you any good if you can't log into your bank's website, because they "recommend" Internet Explorer and Firefox.
OK, Opera's been able to pretend to be IE for the last 10 or 15 years. Pretty much the whole time it's been available to the public. And, 5 years ago, it DEFAULTED to that.
Right now (I'm on 9.64, so it may be slightly different on 10,) you can choose on a per-site basis whether it identifies as Opera, IE/Opera (sorta like how Maxthon and other IE-based browsers identify as an IE variant,) Firefox/Opera, IE (where the user-agent is identical to that of IE,) or Firefox.
I don't care how good the browser is that ad craps all over "I'm a Mac" and "PC Hunter" ads!
A good ad doesn't bring anyone else down. Good work, Opera.
This ad makes me proud to be Norwegian.
And also, Opera has always been the best choice! Suck it, Firefox! ^_^
Firefox FTW!!!
Very 118 118.
The Norwegian accent = pure win!
+1
Then you are gonna love this vid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebqdwQzmSHM&feature=channel_page
I even think it's the same guy doing the voiceover.
what's opera?
genre of music.
A black lady on tv.
It was a pretty good commercial. Show some nice feature in a funny way.
Attaching strings to the boxes to pull them out instead of making a real conveyor belt was a good idea.
Opera is truly the innovator of browsers in terms of features.
Tabs
Zooming
Speed Dial
Voice Commands
Magic Wand
Customization of the GUI
It did all of these things first and it still does them the best.
It also features dozens of useful built-in utilities / capabilities that would be considered must have plug-ins for the likes of FF.
I was once a devout FF user, but for the last couple of years now, Opera has won me over.
Oh, and it also scores 100/100 on Acid3 for what it's worth.
For those about to comment on the lack of 'Adblock Plus', Opera's native solution sans miscellaneous extension is known as the 'Urlfilter', and it's been a feature of Opera for many a moon. But as with much of Opera's potential, you've probably never heard of it.
I love it!
I love the mail client!!!!
It's so efficient. I like the render engine too, its working better and more smoothly than it did for FF and IE.
It's true that Opera packs a lot of features.
But it's also true that I cannot use it due to couple of trivial things which can't changed: tab behavior and session restore.
I prefer (and in office I need) tabs to behave like they do in FireFox. Otherwise number of my workflows simply become succumbed in finding proper tab. E.g. closing a tab: in FireFox you go to the tab left from original, in Opera you go to the last opened tab before. Configuring Opera to behave that way proved to be impossible.
Session restore is also broken, since upon start Opera show content from cache. It's starts fast and all but then you get a shock that your online TODO list has open all the issues you have worked a week to close. Five minutes sweating, checking everything in depth - just to realize that Opera simply pooled a cached version of page from 2 days ago. But that carp came to Fx 3.5 and is just as broken.
In the end, I'd say that customization of GUI in Opera is overstated. It's pretty dumb when it comes to real world problems. I have tried to adopt Opera on many occasions (due to excelled feature set and good performance) but was always set off by minor bogosities here and there.
But as FireFox evolves into "a browser for your mom" I have a feeling that soon Opera would be better than FireFox simply because Fx would have so much crap in it.
i believe there's either an ini statement or a javascript for making the tabs function to open left from original, right from origial, first, last, or previously opened tabs. i remember reading an article about it from the opera team, or on one of the my.opera blogs.
also i believe you can disable reload from cache, or you know, you could just hit the reload button.
@Dummy0001:
Opera's tab close options are to activate the previously used (last) tab, the next tab, or the first child tab (first tab opened from current tab).
Preferences->Advanced->Tabs.
@WindowsFTW: Uhm, no they didn't invent tabs. IBrowse was first.
Tabs were just an interface to the MDI interface that Opera had been using since 1997, though - IBrowse2 didn't come out until 1999.
Upranked for "bogosities" !
Agreed!
Opera never gets any love, despite all of its innovations.
Ya its ok i guess if your on a real slow connection it degrades images and what not to gain speed and it gets 100/100 on acid3 but so does chrome imho the gui is too bulky but turbo is still a nice feature if your on a really slow connection
Oh man, I love it. : )
I love the fact that they using Microsoft Virtual Earth at the beginning of the ad to zoom on Norway.....
Are we still on dial-up? Today's websites are not just a bunch of text anymore. Really though, on a typical broadband connection, the "slowness" of the internet are usually caused by ads/flash (I don't think flash is that "compressible"), and javascript. Firefox + adblock take care most of the "slowness" already. Next step is faster javascript engine, which other browsers (webkit, chrome) are currently aiming for.
Oh well, it's good to see that Opera is still improving their software, instead of just bugging Microsoft all the time for anti-trust.
Opera hasn't been bugging Microsoft all the time. Opera filed a one complaint for EU and EU basically decided that the complaint (which was also backed up by Mozilla and Google) was right. End of story.
Microsoft on the other hand has been bugging Opera all the time. They broke the whole Internet with IE6. Their web services don't follow standards. At one point they even broke their own web pages on purpose just for Opera users, that's sick and disgusting. Luckily nowadays they seem to be at least a bit more sensible.
Opera ships with an adblock equivalent and has done for many a release. It's called the 'Urlfilter'. Like much that is otherwise touted as an awesome extension exclusive to Firefox, this funtionality is actually been built right in for anyone who cares to use it.
@L.Rawlins: "Opera ships with an adblock equivalent"
That's true and false at the same time. Opera has a rudimentary ad filtering. But it doesn't have full feature set of AdBlock Plus (which is current version of AdBlock).
Biggest omission is of course are the subscriptions where you can get your filtering rules from somebody else. Pretty much nobody configures AdBlock manually - after installation you offered to subscribe to one of the several block lists - and you simply never see ads afterwards. Literally nobody now blocks ads manually anymore.
Another big omission is the ability to identify and hide elements by their HTML class/id, not only by the URL. Some nasty ads have pretty random URLs making it hard to narrow down what to block precisely. But quite often they have to have constant in-page identification. AdBlock Plus can use that too - Opera can't.
@Dummy00001
For any content that's not covered by simply nixing urls by way of the Urlfilter, simply right click the page in question and click 'Block content'. You can then use a WYSIWYG overlay to annihilate page content on a click by click basis. I've never had to use the function personally as the Urlfilter broadly covers my needs, but the option is there to get as ruthless as you care to.
@Dummy00001
Incidentally, I don't manually add to my Urlfilter either. Publicly accessible Urlfilters to download into an Opera installation are available and updated regularly by the community. It's not an automated process like the Firefox extension I'll grant you, but it's no major undertaking either to download what amounts to little more than a text file every now and again.
I find Opera's solutions quite adequate to remove the webs commercial annoyances.
Again, the point is whether compression is even necessary these days, especially on a typical broadband connection. Compression won't do much improving video streaming or javascript performance. An what about SSL pages? Compression might be useful during dial-up days, but really, today, the focus should be on javascript performance as most websites are script heavy.
well! I'm writing this with opera 10 with turbo on right now and it completely sucks. The increased speed has made every image pixelated and blurry. I love the UI though it is just a shame that it comes with such a big sacrifice.
You must have Turbo enabled. It will compress images, and thus you may be unhappy with the quality. Turn it off in the bottom left of your window.
If anybody is interested about Turbo in particular I wrote about it here for my degree - http://up-stream.co.uk/2009/05/opera-turbo-testing/
You will also find a PDF report there which has some additional technical info included dissection of ethereal logs showing how turbo operates. Anyway, hope someone finds use for it.
Just turn turbo off, or put it on auto.
It's only meant really for slow connections so you don't have to wait for the page to load in its full form.
Opera Unite has been quite the let down.
Well, this simply makes images blurred and pixelated. If you have a really really really slow connection then this is for you, but because even engadget has realtively big amount of pics could you be able to read my message if you had so slow connection that this would suit you. I mean the connection that might advance from this has to be crap.