How safe is Opera-mini? And is there alternatives for "turbo" feature?

Hi!

I recently decided to check out Opera for its feature of “turbo” mode that helps with going around my country idiotic policy of blocking certain sites.

But I’ve seen that there’s some security concerns? How critical are those?

If it is rather severe than what other alternatives there is that have similar feature to “turbo”?

Edit:

Also how do I summon tab-bar without scrolling all the way to the top?

I worked for Opera, though never on Mini or Turbo. But since I worked on the Desktop browser I knew the people who did. Using any service brings some theoretic problems with it, but in practice at least I would trust Opera. Even now with Chinese owners and basically no Norwegian development left (think they’ve fired most Norwegians by now).

So the question you should be asking is what are you afraid of? What have you to loose, what would Opera have to gain? If either of those is “extremely much” then it’s always better to actually pay for a service or make sure everything is A+. Like, if you’re Edward Snowden, please use TOR and your own VPNs etc.

Since you probably don’t have state actors out to get you, sending your traffic through Opera’s servers should be no issue. Some banks have balked a bit at Opera Mini, since you are basically running the browser that you log into your bank (along with the cookies) at Opera’s servers. It’s one of the use cases that Opera has been okay with site-owners blocking. Do your banking with a normal browser.

Opera does not make money on your information, for Mini they make it from telephone operators, as well as showing you some content and ads on the actual browser start page.

The company and especially the people working there had really high morals. There was also waaaay too much data to even do anything about it, just the logs of connections were cleaned up pretty quickly because it’s too much data that no one really cares about. Keeping logs is also a liability so easier without.

So I trust Opera Mini as well as the various VPN/Turbo things they have.