Opera used to be a fantastic web browser, with a custom high-performance Presto rendering engine and features like tabbed windows that didn't show up in competing browsers until years later. However, the modern Opera browser is a shadow of its former self, reliant on chasing trends and meme advertising to
In Opera Mini, yes. They also had a less popular but nearly identical browser, Opera Mobile, which didn’t do the proxying and compression. I had an unlimited data plan back then, so I always used Mobile. The performance was great even without compression.