The standalone Opera browser is powerful and feature rich. But it does not solve the fundamental issue with wireless networks that hinders the adoption of the mobile Web: the mobile data network is slow and often expensive. For graphics-intensive web pages, the Opera browser needs to first open multiple HTTP connections to download all the images, and then resize them to fit the device screen if SSR is used. That is a slow and bandwidth-intensive process. The multiple round trips needed to fetch images occur very slowly in high-latency wireless networks. This process also quickly drains the battery, due to heavy CPU usage.
If you do not care much about images, you can turn them off from Opera's Settings menu, which will speed things up considerably. Alternatively, Opera displays the page before it downloads all the images. So, you can press the Stop command to stop loading images if the text page is good enough.
The Opera Mobile Accelerator is a subscription-based service that can drastically improve Opera browser performance. The idea is to delegate much of the bandwidth-and CPU-intensive work from the mobile device to a proxy server. When you request a URL from the Opera browser, the request is forwarded to the proxy server, a server running on the Opera network that downloads web pages and images on your behalf. The proxy server fetches the web page and all the images in it, resizes the images, compresses all of them into a more compact format, and then returns the compressed package to the mobile browser. The mobile browser receives the optimized and compressed page and displays it.
It is easy to configure the accelerator proxy for your device. Just load the URL http://www.opera.com/proxy in Opera and the browser automatically configures itself. Behind the scenes, the browser is configured to talk to an HTTP proxy hosted by Opera. Once the Opera browser is configured for the proxy, you get a 14-day trial period to try the service for free. Beyond that, you have to pay a monthly subscription to continue using the proxy service. The proxy server identifies your browser via the phone's International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number and verifies its subscription status. If you decide not to use the service at any time, just go to the Settings Advanced menu and disable the proxy.
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