OK, no Norwegian jokes, please; I’m married to My Favorite Norwegian (OK, so she’s 100% American, but everyone in her family back umpteen generations is Norwegian, so again, no Norwegian jokes). Swedish jokes are fine, though.*
Oh, what’s with mentioning Norway and Norwegians at all? That’s where Opera browser comes from, folks: Norway. And the folks who build this lil browser are smarter than your average M$IE coders, IMO, and quite likely smarter than your average Norwegian, too. They’ve figured out how to make giving away the best browser on the planet make money, for one thing, but it’s the “best browser on the planet” that interest me.
And they’re doing it again–making some serious waves with Opera Turbo, a feature that’s strictly in the preliminary testing phase but which is also just as cool as can be in addressing a huge concern for mobile users or indeed any user with a slow connection.
See the video here or check the text intro here. A snippet:
Opera Turbo is a cross-platform solution, available for desktop computers, mobile phones, and other Internet-enabled devices. By compressing network traffic by up to 80%, Opera Turbo helps to enable the sustainability and scalability of networks in order to meet traffic demands and ensure a superior browsing experience.
Now, while my nominal download speed is usually in excess of 3mbs, I know lots of folks who would benefit from this. Heck, most DSL users would benefit from it, as slow as DSL quite often is.
It’s still in development, but you can download a time-limited test version and try it out if you wish.
Update: Well, I’m using the “time-limited test version” of Opera 10 Turbo right now, and even on my nominal (usual) 3mbit cable connection it’s noticeably faster loading pages. Really snappy! Since I’ve been using the snapshots of the Opera 10 alpha for daily use for the past month or so, it’s really comparing apples to apples when I compare the newest alpha snapshot without Turbo to the newest alpha snapshot with Turbo.
Seriously nice.
*My fav Swedish joke: Why are Swedes buried standing up with their heads above ground? Because their heads are harder than any rock.