Opera Turbo

And finally there's some relief to the people blessed by slow connection blues!!! I'm one among you, if you're a victim of turtle/earthworm slow net connections. I use Airtel Mobile Office, which here provides a maximum download speed of 5.4KB/s!! Browsing is even slower than that because of lethargic response times. If I try to view a site with lots of page elements, graphics, flash content, it takes several minutes to load. If I'm in a blog or a forum and click a few links while holding CTRL+SHIFT(new tab for opera), it'll take ages to load all the pages fully. But now Opera has brought a solution especially for me and the likes! There's no downloading speed boost but there's surely a multi-folds browsing boost. The browsing experience is streamlined several folds. The product name is Opera Turbo. For windows it can be downloaded right here and it is just a 6.2MB download.
So, what's special about it??
First thing, Opera Turbo doesn't connect to the site you wanna view, directly. Instead it uses its separate proxy server labs1-turbo.opera-mini.net to download the page for you. When you request a site say google.com from turbo, it connects to labs1-turbo.opera-mini.net where they've zillion times fast connection than yours. Google.com page is downloaded there, compressed and then sent to your computer! Now that's something rapid!!! But there's a con. The images are converted to save size, and the images look crippled while browsing through turbo. But who cares? Second thing is that, you don't have to compromise on security because secure connections are setup through your own computer and opera-mini server isn't going to perform any man in the middle attacks! ANyways, I trust Opera guys. They won't try eavesdropping my e-mail conversation, nor they've any time for that. lol
Ok, here are two reasons I found why it gives an ultra faster browsing experience for lethargic ISP users:
1. Compressed data download, as Opera designed it to do.
2. Instead of resolving several hostnames and connecting to several servers, it just connects to a single server and downloads all the stuff in one go.

I'm explaining the second one with a simple example. Suppose you wanna view a blog or a forum post with several images, frames, google ads, and several other page elements hosted at different servers. Like, your site is blah.com/blah and the page markup needs to connect to css.blah.com, static.blah.com, img1.blah.com, img2.blah.com, page2ad.googlesyndication.com etc....to display everything correctly Then on any other browser, separate connections to these servers will be opened hence crippling your already slow internet connection. Lots of bandwidth will be wasted to connect, download, manage error/flow control(if required) to each of these separate servers. But with turbo, a single connection will be made to opera-mini server and all data will be downloaded in one go and that too compressed hence giving you a smooth and fast browsing experience.

In the status bar there is a turbo button to enable turbo browsing or disable it. When red, turbo is enabled. When gray, itz disabled. When you hover your mouse pointer over the button, it'll show how much bandwidth you've saved by now.


What Opera have written about it on their blog can be read at http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/03/13/

Turbo will be a feature of Opera 10, which is still beta. I noticed some issues in it being beta. Here are the two:
1. If you toggle turbo anytime, the change will be available in all tabs you open afterwards. It won't be visible in the tab you toggled it or all the ones opened before.
2. The Transfers tool is buggy. Stopping and resume a download corrupts the file.

They'll surely fix the issues in the subsequent versions.
Enjoy fast browsing with Turbo and turbocharge yourself!!

ACID3 Browser Test

You browse the web. There are several browsers to choose from. Everyone has his/her own taste. I like Opera. Someone likes FireFox. Someone else loves the shiny new Google Chrome. Someone sitting elsewhere likes sticking with the good old IE. The availability of myriads of browsers make it difficult for the web developers to code sites because different browsers differ at some part or the another of standards support. So, the geeks, the leaders of the web technology decided to unify web standards and Web Standards Project was born. They worked and designed tests for the browsers to measure the extent of standards supported. ACID3 is the latest in the series. Click the link to benchmark your browser. Following are the scores of some top browsers tested by me on my PC and phone.

Desktop Browsers

Opera 9.63 - 85/100
IE6 - 13/100
Firefox 3.0.0.5 - 71/100
Opera Kestrel Beta2 - 100/100
Opera WinGogi - 99/100

Mobile Browsers

Opera 8.65 on P1i - 38/100
Opera Mobile 9.50 beta2 fingertouch - 73/100
Ozone - 93/100

I'm attaching some screenshots at the end of this blog post.
By the way, Opera have released a specially designed browser codenamed WinGogi that they claim, passes ACID3 by 100/100. It can be downloaded here . I tested on my PC, but it scored 99/100. May be, due to some connection blues. They claim WinGogi to be the first browser that passed ACID3 by 100/100. Source is here. On the other hand Apple claims that WebKit is the first browser engine to pass ACID3 by 100/100. Source is here. lol Whatever... By the way, Opera 10 Kestrel Beta 2 on my PC reached 100/100.

Ok, here are the screenshots.

Ozone on P1i

Opera Mobile 8.65 on P1i

Opera 10 Kestrel

Opera WinGogi

Firefox 3.0.0.5

IE6

Opera 9.63

P1i - Opera Mobile 9.50 - SMS glitch

After the release of Opera Mobile 9.50 beta 2 Fingertouch, I've been using it a lot on my P1i for browsing for hours. I notice a strange behaviour in my P1i when I've browsed the web for long through it. My phone doesn't notify me of any SMS sent to me. Neither with the tone, nor with the icon in status bar. When I restart the phone, the new SMS is displayed. I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't turned my phone off one night before going to bed when I was too tired. In the morning when I booted the phone back I got two SMSes that were sent to me three days ago. lol! I generally didn't use to turn the phone off for weeks. Whenever necessary I used to set it in flight mode. But now I do that every night before going to bed.
Well, a probable reason I guess is that the new Opera Mobile is a RAM hog, and when the RAM goes too low while web browsing, the phone shuts down the SMS client process that listens for SMSes, in order to free up some RAM. Whatever may be the exact reason, it should be fixed by Opera.

Opera Mobile Finfertouch for UIQ3

On 6th of this month Opera released the second beta of Opera Mobile9.50 for us UIQ users!!! Contrary to the popular feeling that UIQ is dead and Opera too will ditch it. The new beta is great! I felt some improvement in stability issues and speed in loading large pages. They also changed the logo. Earlier it looked like the power key!! And the best thing of the new beta is the new Fingertouch technology. According to Opera's official blog:

Today we introduce Opera Fingertouch, a technology designed to make interacting with the Web easier and simpler on touch-based devices. Opera Fingertouch provides visual feedback when you hit a Web link, and assists you when you come across multiple links or other selectable elements in close proximity to one another.

Here's a video released by Opera officially about the new jargon:


I tried capturing the screenshot os fingertouch in action on my P1i but it didn't work. The screen capture apps weren't able to capture the display area of the browser. Only the address bar came. I tried two different apps TOSC(the Open Screen Capture) and CS(Capture Screen), but same result. I'm attaching a screenshot anyways.

Opera Mobile 9.50 beta released for UIQ!

Today on October 20th, 2008 Opera Software after a long wait, have released the first public beta version of its long awaited Web Browser for Symbian OS UIQ3.x platform. Earlier it was available only for Windows Mobile.
According to Opera, following bugs are there:
->The browser sets a new system-wide home-page, which cannot be opened by the embedded Internet browser (Opera 8.65).
->Cursor is not shown when HTML edit fields are partially out of screen.
->No support for landscape screen mode due to a number of system issues with the OpenGL graphical engine.
->Browser plug-ins are disabled by default due to non-existent or incomplete system support for Flash content. They can be enabled by the user for experimental purposes only, via More > Tools > Change settings > Advanced > Allow plug-ins.
->The continuous browser usage experience might be affected by the amount of available phone RAM memory.

As a lucky owner of Sony Ericsson P1i, I got to use their new lil kid. As soon as I came to know about the release I jumped to the Opera Mobile's official download. It was a monstrous 4.14MB!! Yes monstrous because I am using GPRS and it takes an era for downloading 4MB.

I got hold of the browser and was extremely happy to use it. The browser gave me the best experience ever on mobile. I could open the full facebook, and gmail standard view on my phone!!! But alas, due to crappy policies of Orkut its full view isn't available for mobiles. They detect the browser and redirect to the mobile version.

It also comes with the Opera widgets - handy little apps that run in the Opera browser.

So far I'm extremely satisfied with the new app. It changed my perception of web on my phone. The old Opera 8.65 was too crap to be usable. The worst thing that I hated most in it was the automatic link highlighting and mixing up site's CSS with the phone's theme. Digia @Web had come to my rescue but didn't appeal much. And finally Opera 9.5 put an end to my problems and I now can browse the web with ease.

There's an issue with mobile sites on 9.5 though. When you open any XHTML mobile site, it seems to hold the left part of the screen unless you zoom.

For the SE P1i/G700i/G900i/W960i, here is the download link