After posting an article on fasTun that helps to save mobile internet bandwidth usage through compression, avi singh commented that Opera also does the same thing with its Turbo addon. To be honest I don’t know anything about Opera Turbo because I don’t use Opera at all. The only browser that I use are Firefox, Chrome and periodically Internet Explorer. I did a quick search from the official Opera website and it does seem to compress webpages via Opera’s servers so that they use much less data than the originals. This means that there is less to download, so you can see your webpages more quickly.

I downloaded the latest version of Opera (11.52) and installed it on my computer. Enabling Turbo mode is as easy as clicking a button that is located at the bottom left.

There is also an option to configure the Opera Turbo settings, whether you want to automatically enable Opera Turbo only when a slow network is detected, permanently turned on or off.


I’ve used Netlimiter to test and see if Opera Turbo mode can really help us compress the web page and offer a smaller download size. Before running each test, I delete the statistics database from the Netlimiter’s Stats Option, followed by deleting all private data (cache) from the Opera’s web browser, and then start visiting Wikipedia.org, Microsoft.com and Apple.com website. The statistics are then recorded and exported to image. The two charts below shows the total download and upload bandwidth for Opera Turbo mode and Normal mode.

Opera Turbo saves 38% upload and 27% download bandwidth

When Opera Turbo is enabled, some parts of the website is downloaded from Opera’s server and not from the original website. From Netlimiter, I can see that there are a few connections coming from Opera Mini Servers (141.0.11.252) which is located in the USA but the link of the files still remains the same.

Not all webpages loads faster when Opera Turbo is enabled. For example, viewing images from Smugmug with Opera Turbo enabled appears way slower than the normal mode. The Opera Turbo mode is most suitable when you are at a slow network. For home broadband with over 1Mbps connection, you are better off with Turbo mode disabled.

As for Opera Mini web browser, it comes with Turbo mode enabled by default and there is no way to disable it. So if you don’t want to use the Turbo mode, you will have to use another web browser. The Opera Mobile which is for Windows Mobile or Symbian/S60 phone doesn’t have the Turbo mode.

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