Opera Turbo raises some questions

I was just browsing around Ozzu with Opera Turbo enabled and noticed that some avatars look absolutely terrible. Some of them are barely even recognizable, the JPEG blocking looks like a weaved basket.

I think Opera is being a little aggressive in how their automatic tests determine if you're on a "slow" connection in order to get as much content cached on their proxy servers as possible. My connection isn't slow at all, but since Opera notified me that it was I figured I would give it a whirl to see how it goes.

I do see a noticeable change in speed with larger pages, but that image quality, yikes.

Now as I started typing this I got to that Opera Turbo link up top there and realized that it works just like dial-up proxies and mobile phone browser proxies.



Now this makes me wonder, just how many people are using services like this and getting terrible looking images ?

Is there any way to determine whether people are going through a service like this so I can just omit the images that would look bad enough that they're just a waste of space anyway ?

If you've never seen what services like these can do to web pages with images in them, you should really fire up Opera and take a look at the web using Turbo. It's not pretty.

Why not a screenshot? For lazy people like me who don't want to go through all that trouble to look at horrible quality images