14 DAY TRIAL // On the heels of Opera 10.0 Alpha Build 1345, Opera made available for download Opera 10.0 Turbo Alpha Build 1355. This is the first release of the desktop flavor of the browser to come to the table with the turbo-charged browsing technology introduced by the Norway-based company at the Mobile World Congress 2009, on February 12, available to the general public for testing. Opera turbo is a performance optimization and compression technology designed especially to improve end-user experiences when dealing with poor bandwidth. In this regard, users with broadband connections are bound not to notice consistent increases in the speed of Opera, if any.
Opera Turbo is “a server-side optimization and compression technology that provides significant improvements in browsing speeds over limited-bandwidth connections by compressing network traffic. This does not only make you surf faster, but also lowers the cost of browsing when you are on a pay per usage plan,” revealed Roberto Mateu, a product manager at Opera Software.
Opera Turbo works by requesting normal Web content through the Web Optimization Proxy and is capable of dealing with markup, styles, JavaScript, images, as well as the standard HTTP protocol. What Opera Turbo will fail to play nice with is Flash content and animated GIFs. According to the Norwegian browser maker, Flash content won't be made available at all initially, and will only be downloaded after the user clicks on the white box saying "plug-in content" (which will later on be replaced by an image).
“Turbo uses a technology called “Opera Web Optimization Proxy”, which is different from the Opera Binary Markup Language used in Opera Mini. Web sites layout and text will look exactly the same, but image resolution may appear considerably lower as a result of the compression. Dynamic Web technologies such as Ajax (XmlHttpRequests) and Flash are supported, but some plugin content will load only after clicking on the empty element,” Mateu added, promising that moving onward, Opera Turbo will become an integral part of all desktop releases of the browser.
Opera 10.0 Turbo Alpha Build 1355 is available for download here.
The latest build of Opera 10.0 for Windows is available for download here.
The latest build of Opera 10.0 for Linux is available for download here.
The latest build of Opera 10.0 for Mac OS X is available for download here.