Choose Opera

Welcome to another featurette! This time we got Roberto Mateu, Product Analyst at Opera Software, to give us his insight on Opera Turbo and a few growing concerns about this groundbreaking compression technology.

Choose Opera: Welcome to Opera Talks Roberto, could you please introduce yourself?

Roberto: Hey everyone! As you already mentioned I work in the Products group, mostly with things related to the Desktop browser. I'm originally from Venezuela and I have been with Opera for a year now. I also wrote the salsa support module in Opera 10. Ok, not really, but if the W3C asked for it, I would.

Choose Opera: Why is Opera Turbo an important feature and has to be part of a browser?

Roberto: At Opera we are speed fanatics. We obsess over making everything from the installer to your Web pages load as fast as possible. But while we have some beautiful big internet pipes here at our office, a lot of our users have less-than-great connections. In the past we have offered features such as using cached images or even disabling them altogether to make things load faster. Opera Turbo takes this solution to a whole new level: our servers perform the grunt work of compressing the Web page and its contents and then send it back to the user in an efficient package.

It needs to be part of the browser because it makes browsing faster. Period. That's what Jon von Tetzchner said on the first Opera Turbo meeting.

Choose Opera: What does Opera Turbo do for all the millions of broadband users?

Roberto: Opera Turbo lets broadband users feel less nostalgic when they leave their office or home. The world is a pretty big place, and we know that our users don't stay put. Be it an urban warrior in crowded Barcamps and slow public Wi-Fi's, or a backpacker with a wireless data card and even dial-up connections, Opera Turbo offers a significant boost in speed.

Choose Opera: What about using Opera Turbo with broadband?

Roberto: Well, that kind of defeats the whole purpose of the feature. It's like using high-quality headphones when you are already in the concert. It doesn't make sound even better, it's actually decremental to the experience.

Choose Opera: What about mobile? I've heard Opera Mini already is using Turbo?

Roberto: When developing Opera Turbo we certainly used our server expertise from Opera Mini (currently they even share some infrastructure) but they are separate technologies. The latest public version of Opera Mobile for Windows Mobile on the other hand, does include Opera Turbo. This doesn't only make the browser much faster, but also reduces your data consumption, something to keep in mind when you have a pay-as-you-go data plan.

Choose Opera: Why doesn't Opera Turbo perform as promised in some areas of the world?

Roberto: As mentioned above, the world is a pretty big place . In the first Labs release of Opera Turbo, we only used our Norwegian servers to provide the compression. In many cases this isn't a problem: if you're in Malaysia and you visit bbc.co.uk, the lag would be comparable and you benefit from the compression. But if you're in Malaysia and you visit a local site, depending on the connection speed, the benefits of the compression is not significant enough to compensate for the longer round-trip your data needs to take. That said, we are currently working on adding other regional data centers to help with this scenarios.

Choose Opera: What about privacy? Many are concerned what happens when their data goes through Opera's Turbo servers.

Roberto: I understand why a user would feel skeptical about data going through anyone else's servers. We take privacy extremely seriously here at Opera. It's not only part of our culture, but Opera Turbo is also subject to Norwegian laws regarding personal data, which are among the most strict in the world. I also believe that our record speaks for itself: it has been four years since the first release of Opera Mini, and even with tens of millions of users we still have not had any issues. Of course, desktop and mobile use is different, which led us to take some extra precautions like not passing any SSL traffic through the Opera Turbo Servers.

Choose Opera: Many do not want to enable Opera Turbo because of the lack of image quality. Is there any way to prevent this?

Roberto: We have discussed this a lot internally. The thing users should keep in mind is that text compression can only go so far. To really make a difference at the speeds we are targeting Opera Turbo for, we need to compress images. There has also been a lot of fine-tuning with regards of how we compress the images, and we feel that currently it offers a good balance of image quality vs. size. As they say: "It's a feature, not a bug".

But here are two small tips that can help out:

• If you really need to see an image in full resolution with Opera Turbo enabled, just right-click on it and select "Reload Image in Full Quality" Ta-da!
• If you upload an image to your site/blog/etc and want users of Opera Turbo to see it full quality, save it as PNG with transparency mask (Alpha channel). Opera Turbo doesn't compress this type of images.

Thanks for the questions! I hope you find some of it useful. Feel free leave me a comment below, add me as a friend on My Opera or follow me on Twitter.