As I have mentioned before, over the last year I've been sharing a house in which for various reasons there is no internet connection. So I've been mostly using the WiFi at the public library on my laptop and from time to time picking up a connection here and there such as McDonalds and Starbucks WiFi.
I do have an unlimited data plan with my mobile phone service provider, which means I can use my phone to tether to my laptop when I am at home and wish to go online. Of course, "unlimited" really means that I get 6 GB worth before they throttle the speed down.
When I first tried out Yandex, which I did purely out of curiosity, I was not aware of a feature called "Turbo" until I started to poke around in it. Turbo is something that Yandex picked up from Opera and as far as I know no other browser comes with a similar feature. Basically it compresses data and sends it from a proxy for to speed things up. Not only would this come in handy when tethering, but also for people who live in remote areas that still use dial-up to get online. Besides, sometimes public WiFis are bogged down and it becomes useful then to. Tip: when your downloading dozens of torrents on the library WiFi it also comes in handy.
While I found Yandex to be needing more development before I would pick it up as a browser I would use, I was intrigued by this feature. I have been using Opera Beta now for the last couple of weeks, and have grown to like it, mainly because of this feature. While I have not made it my main browser, it's what I launch when my connection is slow. In many ways it reminds me of early Chrome: fast, light on the CPU and easy on memory usage. Plus, many Chrome extensions will work with it.
Vivaldi is a new browser in beta developed by Opera co-founder and former CEO Jon Stephenson. It seems to have very similar goals in mind with Yandex with the look of the browser integrating it's look with the websites you visit. It sports a similar look, feel and functionality of earlier versions of Opera. However, I found that while it was a little less sluggish than Yandex it didn't look as kewl and transparent plus there is no Turbo Mode (at least for now).
I tried a couple of Chrome extensions that are supposed to act similar to Turbo Mode with both Vivaldi and Chrome Canary but they just didn't cut the mustard. I found CC to feel much more bulkier than using Pale Moon.
I would have to recommend Opera to anyone using a slow connection and since it seems to be pretty light, I would say it would be a decent choice for any computers using 2 GB of RAM or less as well.
I'm going to keep my eye on Vivaldi and CC is still my favourite choice out of the various Chrome/Chromium forks.
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