Opera Quietly removes Opera Turbo

The popular Turbo mode feature in the Opera browser that loads pages faster on slow networks no longer exists, Opera Software has removed it from Opera 60 without announcing the reason for it, Opera 58 is the last version to have it.

[lwptoc]

What is Opera Turbo?

Opera introduced Turbo mode for its desktop browser several years back, for a while it has been called off-road mode, which when enabled, loads web pages faster by compressing images and other files in the webpage on their turbo servers and then sends compressed data back to users devices.  This saves bandwidth costs and the images displayed when in turbo mode will be of reduced quality of course.

Opera Turbo was removed from Opera 60 onwards

We should have doubted this coming when the company removed the Turbo mode option from the menu and moved to browser settings in Opera 46  now it doesn’t exist in settings either in the current version that has the so-called Reborn 3 design.

One of the moderators of Opera forums acknowledged this and said when asked by users why turbo mode disappeared in Opera 60, he said it was a “useless feature” and continuing it costs them more.

We’ve downloaded Opera 58 from the Opera FTP site and confirmed Turbo mode exists and is disabled by default in settings, check the screenshot below.

Surprising users without mentioning changes they’re making to Opera is becoming a passion to Opera software, recently with Opera 57, the company started not allowing ad blockers to block ads on the Google search results page by default unless user visits extension options and selects “Allow access to search page results”.

READ: Opera 57 shows ads on Google Search result Pages despite Adblocker installed [Fix]

Opera runs three different channels, Stable, Beta, and Developer, and posts information about their releases on their desktop team blog, dear Opera, if you make changes such as adding or removing features, let users know.

People now have high-end systems and better internet speeds (more than 1GBPS) doesn’t require turbo mode, but some could be using it for sure. Google recently launched lite pages for mobile where like turbo mode, compression will be done on the server side and URLs will be loaded faster after that on mobile devices. BTW, on Android, Opera and mini browsers still have data savings features.