Opera Turbo

» see opera.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

I went 14.4k, then 33.6k, then 56k, at home in Turkey between 1998 and roughly 2005, and by the time Opera Turbo shipped I was on TTNet broadband and did not need it. That is bad timing rather than distance. Turbo was built precisely for the connection I had spent seven years on and it arrived four years after I got off it.

It shipped with Opera 10 on 1 September 2009, after a February announcement and a set of Labs builds that spring. Switch it on and your requests stopped going straight to the site. They went to Opera's servers in Norway first, which fetched the page, recompressed the images hard and sent back a bundle that Opera measured at 71 percent smaller on a desktop and up to 80 percent on a phone.

Opera 60 landed on 9 April 2019 with a crypto wallet and a rebuilt interface, and without Turbo. Opera 58 was the last build that had it. No blog post and no line in the release notes: people found out by opening settings and not finding the checkbox, and the answer they got in the official forums came from a moderator who called it a useless feature that cost more to keep than it returned.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it worked ~

It was a man in the middle you had asked for. Every unencrypted request went through Opera's proxy, which had a fast connection to the site and a slow one to you, and it spent its own bandwidth to save yours. Images came back recompressed to a much lower quality, which is why pages under Turbo looked slightly wrong in a way you trained yourself to stop noticing.

This is not the same technology as Opera Mini, which people confuse with it constantly. Mini rendered the whole page on Opera's servers and shipped the phone a compact binary description of the finished result, so the handset was barely running a browser. Turbo left rendering on your machine and only shrank what crossed the wire.

~ who it was for ~

Five million people had it switched on by November 2009, up sixty percent in a single month from 3.2 million in October, which is not the adoption curve of a convenience feature. Opera's share through those years was strongest in markets where a megabyte cost something, and Turbo is a large part of why.

There was a secondary crowd who used it as a proxy rather than a compressor, to get around an office firewall or make hotel wifi bearable. But the core audience was the one Opera always had, which was everybody the American browser vendors were not designing for.

~ the quiet removal ~

By 2019 most page loads were HTTPS, and a proxy that cannot see inside a request cannot compress what is in it. Opera could have terminated TLS at its own servers and re-encrypted on the way out, which is exactly what Opera Mini's extreme mode did and exactly what people objected to once they understood it. On the desktop the company chose not to, and then chose not to explain.

The feature that took Turbo's place in the marketing was the free VPN, which routes your traffic through Opera's servers for an entirely different reason and makes the pages no smaller.

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