Like Amazon, Opera wants to build a more efficient web browser for Android than what is offered by Google. According to CNET, they’re calling it Opera with Turbo. Inelegant as the name may sound, the idea behind it is anything but.
It is the marriage of Opera’s Mobile and Mini browsers. When you’re on Wi-Fi, or when your mobile connection is blazing, it will render pages directly on the device. But when the connection is crap, Turbo mode will automatically kick in and will render pages on its own servers and spit out a more static page free of HTML, CSS and Javascript, which CNET says vastly cuts down on file sizes.
Here’s a comparison I ran using the new data-tallying feature of Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. The BBC’s home page is 1.7MB, a size you can check using Opera running its default state with Turbo turned off. Turning Turbo on shrinks the page size to 519KB. With Opera Mini, the page size shrinks even more, to just 304KB.
Not only does this allow for quicker page load times, but will also cut down on battery consumption since your cellular radio won’t be frying itself trying to load a massive page through a weak signal. Amazon’s Silk browser also revolves a similar concept, rendering parts of webpages and caching them on its own server, in an effort to improve speed, user experience and ostensibly, battery life.
Opera hasn’t said exactly when the Opera with Turbo browser will become available for Android devices except that it will be here in “early 2012″. [CNET]
SmileySmoke
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 10:30 AMthe only browser i use on android/pc. and have done so for years. smaller footprint, less mem usage, more customizations. f12 for instant advanced features. opera for life
Ash
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 10:33 AMWaiting for it. Although with 1.5GB of data to kill every month it doesnt really worry me that much at the moment as to how much data I use for browsing.
mkshft
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 11:29 AMmaybe they should call it tOpera?