First Look at Opera 10: Can it Make a Dent in the Desktop? | Linux Magazine
"Speed, and Does it Matter?
Opera 10 adds “Opera Turbo” for the browser, so you can speed up browsing on slower networks. According to the site, Opera “uses Opera proxy servers to compress the traffic before it reaches the Opera browser on the client’s computer.
In my experience, turning on “Turbo” means fuzzy graphics and slightly faster load times. I tested the build for openSUSE, so I can’t say for sure if this is true across all platforms. Maybe there’s something wonky with Opera interacting with a graphics library on openSUSE, or who knows what. But the Turbo didn’t seem to make a huge difference when using broadband, anyway, so I turned it off pretty quickly. For the poor souls stuck on dial-up, a little fuzziness might be acceptable if it means not waiting 30 minutes for a Web page to load.
Overall, page rendering in Opera 10 beta 1 seems slightly faster overall than in Firefox 3.5 beta 4. But, the difference is marginal, and unless you’re really impatient, the speed differential probably isn’t going to make a major difference."