Opera 10 Benchmarked and Evaluated
CNETNate writes "Dial-up connections and flaky Wi-Fi are made significantly more tolerable with Opera 10, it seems. After yesterdays news that Opera 10's first beta had landed, some testing was in order. One major new feature is Opera Turbo — server-side compression — which shrinks pages before sending them down your browser. With a 100Mbps connection throttled to a laughable 50Kbps, Opera 10 proved itself to outperform every other desktop browser on the planet, and there are graphs to prove it. Javascript benchmarks put the new browser in fourth place overall, after Chrome 2, Safari 4 and Firefox, but it indeed passes the Acid3 test with a perfect score. If you ever use a laptop on public Wi-Fi, to not have Opera 10 installed could be a big mistake"
Back when my net connection was a 56kb/s modem, I used to make an ssh connection (with compression) to a machine at university, and then tunnel through that to the university's http proxy server. That gave a handy speed increase compared to making http requests directly over the modem link. You could also try the RabbIT compressing web proxy. All this relies on having a server somewhere with a fast net connection that you can run programs on - and this is the service that Opera Software are really providing.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com