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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.'"
without units. 281ms per what? Apparently a bunch of tests listed on http://celtickane.com/projects/jsspeed.php
Now my question is, how significant is ~500 ms for these tests? All I care about is how long it takes to load a typical webpage I surf, and for me, Firefox seems almost instantaneous for most pages. "Smacks silly" my be an overstatement.
Not to mention font rendering. If using sub-pixel anti-aliasing, or anti-aliasing against the real background and not the document's bgcolor (or css equivalent), yes, it takes a lot longer, for a much better rendered result. Opera can be downright ugly when using small serif fonts on a non-uniform background, and Safari tends to dither against the wrong colour, especially if a table cell has a different colour than the document itself.
Regarding text rendering... What bugs me is that since the first Firefox, every so often, you get a horisontal line which is skewed by one pixel. This happens on both Linux and Windows, on different machines, with different fonts, with all Gecko engines. When this happens between lines, it's not TOO bad -- it just looks odd when there's suddenly a pixel more space between two lines than all the others, but when it happens in the text itself, it's VERY noticable. And if you select the text on that line and unselect it again, the problem goes away. It's like the rendering engine pre-calculates how much vertical space to set aside for the text in order to to increase rendering speed. Then, when drawing the text, the actual result never matches the space, so it duplicates or chops lines at random intervals until it the text fits. I'd rather wait a little longer and avoid this problem.
You've clearly never used Opera if you're attempting to spin this article by claiming that we just plain don't know that Opera renders stuff in general near the top of the pack already, and also is perhaps the most standards compliant browser.
.x build, I still have yet to see anything on FF that makes me believe it's worth the switch... and to top it off I'm a web developer by trade. I code for Opera, then break it for FF and IE.
Not to mention that Opera 9.x is one of the only stable browsers with tentative support for HTML 5.
I get a kick out of FF fans on this site. FF is by no means bad, but Opera clearly has areas where it consistently outshines the open-source browser. Before, people used to say "I don't like ads in my browser" as an excuse for not using it. Then when it became free, it was "I use lots of GreaseMonkey scripts", despite the fact that you can use most GM scripts in Opera too.
Opera leads the way for most browsing achievements, and they show no signs of stopping. I've been using it since version 6, and though I give FF a whirl every
FanFictionRecs.net
Don't laugh: I'm running the latest version of Opera on an almost 10 year old Libretto 110CT with 32 MB RAM running Windows 98SE.
It works quite well, and a lot better than most browsers on portable devices.
Thank you, Opera !
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Right-click --> Block content
F12 --> Enable plug-ins
F12 --> Enable JavaScript
If you need to do any of these on a per-site basis: F12 --> Edit site preferences. Additionally you can also switch off:
You can change these settings for one site or all sites. Now is that enough for you, or do Opera need to call this functionality 'adblock plus', 'flashblock' and 'noscript' and supply it in addon form? :-)
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
I've written both simple demos and fairly sophisticated JavaScript apps (which can do Sim City / Civilization 2.5 isometric views like this - and render them extremely quickly so you that you can pan around the environment as if it was a native title)).
When it comes to looping through a large array of arrays (e.g. the terrain tile detail in one of the above examples), applying style or class attributes to DOM elements, creating or moving DOM elements on a page and dealing with event handlers Safari wins hands down, followed by FireFox, Opera and IE (in all respects). The "Opera is the fastest" claim holds very little weight with me having compared them. What Opera has is a very fast UI that's extremely responsive, which is all a bit smoke and mirrors really. It's not particularly fast at script execution or object manipulation as soon as things get interesting (it lags behind Safari and FireFox certainly, but it's still far ahead of IE), and of course it renders perfectly valid pages very differently from Safari and FireFox (for which is sometimes possible to blame ambiguities in the standards, but that it doesn't follow the lead of Gecko/KHTML/Webkit or IE is a bit annoying - though do I appreciate the complexity involved).