"Fastest Browser On Earth" Cuts Crud

gabec writes "The guys at Opera have been rewriting their rendering engine over the past 18 months, tossing out legacy code and making the browser more DOM compliant with the intention of making the self-proclaimed "fastest browser on earth" even faster. They claim to have succeeded, according to this article on ZDNet.. Fun stuff.. ;)"

Comments

Re:Is rendering speed the problem?

[FFFish]

Ah, but Opera is far more than a browser for Windows. It's also a browser for cell phones, terminals, PDAs and more. Some of these *are* double-digit MHz machines.

Re:This is a bit silly

[Idarubicin]

Between Opera, IE, and Mozilla, the speed difference is small enough for your average user not to know the difference.

True enough for the mythical 'average user' whose desktop machine is less than two years old. As a university student who is working on a four-year-old PII-300 at home, and a PI-133 with 64 MB of RAM at work (age unknown), every last cycle is precious. Particularly since I'm usually multitasking.

The footprint--in memory, in terms of clock cycles eaten, on my tiny hard drive--of my browser actually a very important consideration for me, and probably for others. The F12 for quick menus (to kill popups, mostly), the clean file transfer monitoring box, and the tabbed browsing (fewer windows on my task bar) are worth their weight in gold.

Opera has also been quick to respond to bugs and make critical fixes--something that some companies are loathe to do. (Ahem. Microsoft. Certificates. Ahem.)

And it really is the fastest (of IE, Moz, and Opera) browser on earth.

Opera has this

[Wee]

is the ability to Cancel a download, click the link again, and have the browser (usually) pick up where the previous download attempt left off.

I don't know about Mozilla, but Opera has this. It also seems more stable (and perhaps less bloated, although I haven't quantified that statement) than Mozilla as well. You also get a pop-up killer feature, is my favorite feature of Opera. My next favorite is the fact that Opera starts to download a file while you are choosing the location to save it to. More often than not, the download is done before I navigate to where it should be.

-B

Re:footprint/loading

[swordgeek]

Hmmm, curious. I've not played with Opera for a while, but I'll assume it _is_ the fastest, since I've heard that so many times. (and very little opposition to that statement)

But of the ones I've used, I find the speed goes:

Mozilla IE NS6 NS4

NS4 is _dog_ slow for anything other than simple HTML pages, and usually looks like hell. IE is admittedly pretty close to Mozilla. I hate the interface, the anti-standard stance, and the company, but it's fairly fast.

Any version of NS6 I've seen has been such a disaster considering that it's based on Mozilla, that I've quit telling people it exists.

Popups and tabs

[ErfC]

Popups are annoying. They're a big part of why people use javascript for things that HTML does perfectly well, for one thing.

There is an HTML tag for "open link in a new browser window", I believe. Except that in that case, it leaves you with all your menus, browsing control buttons, scroll bars, window-resizing abilities, etc. etc. Too many times I've had an unreadable popup window appear because I'm using a bigger font than they expect and it doesn't line up with the graphics, but they turn off all access to scroll bars. Grr.

I don't understand why people force users to open things in new windows, anyway. Maybe this is just a feature of *n*x-based browsers, but with Mozilla, Netscape, and (my fave) Galeon I can middle-click to get a new window, and I often do; saves the reload that often comes with hitting the back button. But that decision should be mine, not the page author's -- if I'm not coming back to the original page, I'd rather open the new one in the same window. (Is this a middle-click thing feature of Windows browsers, too? eg. Windows Mozilla? I'm pretty sure IE doesn't do this...?)

As for tabs, they're handy for when I open a page that does have popups. The popups go in their own tabs, and I can safely ignore them (if they're ads or whatever) and just close the whole window when I'm done with the page -- the popups all vanish with everything else.