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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.'"
Those milliseconds really add up...
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.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
The Opera web browser is no longer ad supported. Just thought you should know.
You're only 2 years out - the ads were dumped in Opera 8.5, and that was released on the 20th of September 2005.
If you're going to complain about something, please try and make it relevant.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
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
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.
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.
Automatically updating block lists, Opera doesn't have that. Flashblock displays an inline play button over all flash content so you can choose to play something instantly. Noscript gives you an icon right at the bottom showing what domains are allowed and what are blocked from running scripts and you can white and black list things through the same menu. Opera doesn't even come close to matching these features natively, and if there's plugins that do I'm not aware of them. And I'll kick in Down Them All plugin that I can't live without now. So that's four reasons I can't use Opera, even though I like it better than FF in a lot of ways, the UI is solid and it's very snappy with a low memory footprint.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
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).
Forgive the person for not knowing, he's still waiting for the news to load in one of the slower browsers.
rewriting history since 2109
I tried Opera.
Good browser it may be, but I don't like it. It's better than IE, but then, so is Lynx.
I like Firefox not so much for its speed (I'll admit Opera is faster), but for the extensions.
And yes, some of the more often used extensions do come off as copies of stuff first introduced in Opera, which makes Opera a bit of the Apple of the browser world.
And JFTR: Opera fanboys (the few that I've encountered) are worse than Linux, Mac and Amiga fanboys combined.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Luciano Pavarotti September 6, 2007 R.I.P. yesterday.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luciano_Pavarotti
What matters Opera without Pavarotti about?
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.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
I just switched from FF to Opera because of its low market share numbers - which was the same reason I switched from IE to FF when the FF market was about 2%.
Pffft. I'm must more emo than you, I use Lynx which has practucally no market share!
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin