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.'"

Comments

Those numbers mean nothing...

[rm999]

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.

Re:Opera faster _with JavaScript_

[JordanL]

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.

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 .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.

Re:its all about the addons

[jeevesbond]

adblock plus

Right-click --> Block content

flashblock

F12 --> Enable plug-ins

noscript

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:

1. GIF/SVG animation
2. Sound (ever come across a site with an annoying MIDI tune playing in the background?)
3. Java
4. JavaScript scripts receiving right-clicks (and some other JavaScript settings)
5. Referrer logging
6. Lots of other stuff, above is what I've found useful.

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? :-)

The WebKit implementation is superior IMO

[Anonymous Coward]

Testing javascript with Safari is like testing javascript with NoScript -- of course it's going to be faster since it doesn't really work The WebKit implementation of JavaScript is easily better than the implementation in FireFox, Opera or Internet Explorer's JScript. Note I'm not saying just 'different', actually better - by which I mean it's demonstrably faster, is more feature complete, and requires less workarounds when you start doing complicated things (all centered around event handling though really, both FireFox and IE have issues with what you can/can't do when it comes to events and referencing properties of objects - in Safari everything I would expect to work, just does, though YMMV).

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).