Question from Camille I.: I have cable Internet through Charter and it’s usually pretty fast, but during the evenings it sometimes slows to a crawl. I read somewhere a while back that some web browsers work better on slow Internet connections than others. Can you recommend one?
Rick’s answer: I sure can Camille. For overall speed it’s hard to beat Google Chrome, but if you have a slow Internet connection Opera running in turbo mode is amazing! What makes Opera so much faster over a slow connection than other browsers is their data proprietary compression system.
When your Opera browser requests a web page from the remote server, the HTML code and images for that page are downloaded to Opera’s servers first and then compressed. The compressed data is then transmitted from Opera’s servers directly to your browser. Since the compressed files contain far fewer “bits” of data than the original files, it takes a lot less time to transmit them to your PC over your slow Internet connection.
I’ve been using Opera Mini on my Android phones for years because it loads web pages over 3G/4G so much faster than other browsers. I recently began testing Opera on my PC as well, and the results have been phenomenal. I strongly recommend it! If you’d like to give Opera a try you can download it right here for free!
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