Opera Turbo comes to Opera for Android

April 28th, 2015

Today marks the release of the latest version of Opera for Android! And, we have some nice new features to share with you!

Opera Turbo mode

First of all, the (red) Off-Road mode toggle is now replaced with a (blue) Turbo mode switch, and, as you can guess, this feature is now powered by our Turbo servers.

What exactly does this mean?

In short, it means that you’ll get the best of both worlds: you can save a lot of data without compromising on the site’s layout or functionality.

In previous versions of Opera for Android, selecting Off-Road mode would compress and render the webpage on the Mini servers, after which it would be sent to the browser. This was great, as you could save a lot of data, but, in certain cases, there were site-compatibility problems due to architectural limitations and the resulting lack of complex JavaScript support.

With our new Opera Turbo mode, we still compress (non-HTTPS) page content as much as possible on our Opera Turbo servers (which are now smarter and faster than before), but the page rendering happens on your phone. This means no more site-compatibility issues, and even pages with complex interactions and animations will work fine. All that while you’re still saving valuable data!

Also, note that we’re using the cache much more efficiently than before — we only redownload data when really necessary, something that wasn’t possible with the Opera-Mini-powered Off-Road mode.

Tab syncing

Opera for Android now syncs tabs with other Opera instances! Just click the computer-with-arrows icon in the bottom-left corner of the tab switcher, and you’ll find a handy list of the tabs that are or were last opened in other Opera browsers you’re running.

Automatic text-wrap

Are you tired of that constant left-right panning you have to do in order to read long lines of text on non-mobile optimized sites? You’ll be very happy to hear that we’ve enabled automatic text-wrap by default in this release: the maximum paragraph width is now automatically adjusted to the width of your screen, making reading much more comfortable.