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Opera 9.5 Beats Firefox and IE7 As Fastest Browser
Abhinav Peddada writes "Ars Technica takes Opera 9.5, the latest from Opera's stable, for a test run and finds some interesting results, including it being a 'solid improvement to an already very strong browser.' On the performance front, Ars Technica reports 'Opera 9.5 scored slightly higher (281ms) than the previous released version, 9.23 (546ms). And Opera 9.x, let it be known, smacks silly the likes of Firefox and Internet Explorer, which tend to have results in the 900-1500ms range on this test machine (a 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM). Opera was 50 percent faster on average than Firefox, and 100 percent faster than IE7 on Windows Vista, for instance.'"
The article links to a Javascript benchmark only. There are many many more variables involved in determining how fast a given browser is, although certainly Javascript plays it's part. Variables like how soon does the browser start processing incoming, but yet incomplete data, etc. influence the browser's snappiness a lot aswell.
Basically, the speed of the browser depends upon the speed of the html parsing engine, available bandwidth, browser settings, speed of the cache and Javascript, just to mention the main variables.
Still, I'm interested how comes Opera's Javascript is so fast compared to the other browsers.
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Be yourself no matter what they say
So Opera is much faster than FF when running JavaScript tests, according to Ars Technica.
Numbers are meaningless without context
Right now, the biggest issues with both IE and Firefox is a huge memory footprint. If Opera wants to bring something valuable to the table, make sure it can run smoothly on XP with 256 megs of memory. That would be valuable for a lot of people with aging hardware.
.: Max Romantschuk
I can't believe they left out Konqueror!
Opera is faster than Firefox across the board. Always has been, and probably always will be. Put that into context whatever way you want. So what's the point of your emphasis again?
At the same time, Opera is also smaller, lighter, more stable, more innovative, better integrated, and comes from a company that behaves ethically towards the rest of the software community (eg, it does not engage in patent warfare to pummel the competition).
Yet because it's not open source (it's been "free as in beer" for quite some time now, but even that's news to some people here) it's practically awarded pariah status by many Firefox zealots who typically use nothing more than ignorance and FUD to put it down.
Seriously, the amount of anti-Opera, pro-Firefox propaganda (for want of a better word) here on Slashdot is ridiculous. Opera is, and always has been, a top-notch product.
In the eyes of this humble observer, it's a far better browser than any other, but regardless of our personal preferences, isn't it time that people gave it due respect? Or is good software engineering only to be appreciated if it comes from the open source community?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I'd like a multi threaded browser, where something heavy in one tab doesnt drag the rest of the browser down to a crawl...
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Opera aims at different market -- small gadgets. This is where the speed is really critical. For IE and FF good enough is enough, since performance on modern desktops is not that critical.
Opera aims at different market -- small gadgets. This is where the speed is really critical. For IE and FF good enough is enough, since performance on modern desktops is not that critical.
As a Quad G5 (4x 2500) Mac owner with lots of RAM, I really don't want a browser choking up an entire CPU and flooding my memory. I didn't pay money to cover amateur programming mistakes by other people. As same guy, I flamed Opera guys about not fixing a bug happens on Slashdot beta, first thing I checked was that after getting that awesome 9.5 alpha and yes it is fixed.I have used a Xeon Video workstation lately and poor AVID was acting like it is on 80386 because a stupid "free" antivirus was taking whole CPU cycles trying to "scan" gigabyte level raw videos while it was asked to ignore them.
It is common getting replies as "get more RAM" or "upgrade your CPU" from various browser fans but when I see a browser using 100% CPU , I get alerted about what kind of security issues it may have and why I should be wasting my CPU to it.
Opera's power comes from managing to code and sell full feature browsers which would even run on Nokia 7650 with 2 MB of RAM. Don't let the Desktop versions memory usage fool you, it is mostly RAM Cache, not memory "flood". Instead of flooding memory, they use it for a good reason and release immediately when another app needs it.
Maybe I just don't have spiderman senses or Clint Eastwood style reflexes that most web users have, but the wait of less than half a second for a webpage to render doesn't really bother me that much.
I'm not saying this because I'm a Firefox fanboy, or because I don't like Opera, I just don't get why it matters. Even on MySpace it doesn't take so long to render a webpage that it bothers you, and if a webpage takes a long time to load it'll almost certainly be because of your network connection or the server and not rendering time.
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