Cape Town – As the coronvirus Covid-19 outbreak has forced citizens across the country - and globe - to adapt to a new way of life, many are relying on the internet to work from home, keep up the latest news and communicate with loved ones.
With President Cyril Ramaphosa's announcement of the 21-day lockdown, the internet has become a tool of survival.
The downside to this, however, is the country-wide increased use of the internet can result in slower-than-usual network connections.
Here are a few ways to save data during this long and dreary lockdown.
Limit data usage and browse smoothly
When that all important episode is on Netflix, there is nothing worse than slow connectivity.
Opera allows users to limit their network bandwidth use by switching on data-saving mode in their settings, ensuring that users can load pages more easily and quickly while using less data.
Scared of going overboard? The data usage can be monitored on the data savings badge on the left of the address bar.
The badge appears once data-savings mode has been switched on in settings, and will stick around for as long as data savings are enabled, or until the next browsing session.
To speed up browsing on congested networks, you could try switching on the ad blocking function
, which effectively speeds up page loading times.
Give offline pages some love
While there is a need to stay connected all the time during the lockdown, it is important to 'disconnect' and unwind.
The improved offline pages feature lets users save any website for offline reading.
The offline pages section can become a collection of articles or websites users can engage with distraction-free in airplane mode. When air travel is possible again, it will most likely be your new best friend.
Android users now also have the option to customise the storage location for their offline pages, giving the choice of storing the pages on internal storage or on an external card.
Quicker Speed Dial access
Opera has introduced autocompletion for Speed Dials on Android browsers. Once users type a word that matches the URL or title of Speed dial item, it will be autocompleted directly in the address bar.
Easy crypto purchases around the world
After having introduced the feature in Scandinavia and later in the US, Opera now allows for easy crypto wallet top-ups around the world.
Opera supports IPFS, decentralised “cloudless storage” and .crypto domain addresses through a partnership with Unstoppable domains. This makes it easy to name crypto wallet addresses.
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