On a horse? Opera Turbo to the rescue!

In a jeep? On the train? On a horse? Yes, we enjoy outdoor activities too. But we also enjoy a fast Internet connection in places where you normally wouldn't expect it. That's why we made Opera Turbo. With Opera 11.10 shipping tomorrow, we've made the impossible possible: Opera Turbo is faster than ever before. Areas of improvement include:

• Added WebP compression as a replacement for JPEG
• More efficient, and fewer, network connections
• Faster secure connections (SSL)
• Bugfixes (yeah, we make mistakes too)

The most noticeable difference is probably WebP. An open standard image format that was released with some fanfare by Google last year. We thought it was about time to replace the 20 year old JPEG format with something more modern. Let's take a look at the differences:

Image courtesy of mauriz.

Overall, WebP produces images with less artifacts and crisper details, even though the image takes less space. Another cool effect is that it also makes people look younger. :p

So, how good is Opera Turbo now?

We tested how much data was downloaded for a number of popular websites. In our tests we saw (on average) about 22% less data transferred compared between old and new Opera Turbo. Take a look for yourself:

Site	Original size	Old Opera Turbo	NEW Opera Turbo
BBC.com (Science)	1562.5 kB	1111.0 kB	724.1 kB
Wired	1152.8 kB	546.9 kB	398.7 kB
Tumblr	1680.2 kB	323.l6 kB	234.6 kB
Pitchfork	1680.5 kB	679.2 kB	680.9 kB
dribbble.com	999.5 kB	238.9 kB	234.7 kB
Dagbladet.no	4724.4 kB	1394.5 kB	1055.3 kB
New York Times	562 kB	385.2 kB	340.2 kB
Total data downloaded:	12361.9 kB	4679.3 kB	3668.5 kB

As you can see, there's both speed and data to be saved. We also did a speed comparison with and without Turbo on a limited connection [1]. Testing is hard. Results will differ from which sites you load, where in the world you are and how slow your network is. In our benchmarks we saw around 260% [2] speed improvement.

So, with even faster Turbo, there's even less reason to sit inside. Summer is around the corner - you're set to hit the road with turbo!

[1] We tested Turbo with Netlimiter, limited DL/UL to 52 kB/s, which is similar to EDGE speeds, and benchmarked with our own custom speedtest, called oBench. OBench is a modified version of iBench, where the webpages in the benchmark, Alexa top 45, are stored on our own servers in order to eliminate effects from slow serverside response times.

[2] based on pages per second with Turbo vs pages per second without Turbo.

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Source: http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/show.dml/29009132