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Opera 10 Benchmarked and Evaluated
CNETNate writes "Dial-up connections and flaky Wi-Fi are made significantly more tolerable with Opera 10, it seems. After yesterdays news that Opera 10's first beta had landed, some testing was in order. One major new feature is Opera Turbo — server-side compression — which shrinks pages before sending them down your browser. With a 100Mbps connection throttled to a laughable 50Kbps, Opera 10 proved itself to outperform every other desktop browser on the planet, and there are graphs to prove it. Javascript benchmarks put the new browser in fourth place overall, after Chrome 2, Safari 4 and Firefox, but it indeed passes the Acid3 test with a perfect score. If you ever use a laptop on public Wi-Fi, to not have Opera 10 installed could be a big mistake"
Given this is server side technology, I presume it's not part of the opera web browser. Sounds like they're using a proxy server with gzip added. There's a beta stage patch for squid to allow you to do that yourself http://devel.squid-cache.org/projects.html#gzip
i've been using opera for quite a while, and i agree that it is an awesome browser.
the main problem however is that it's got bad compatibility with lots of sites. not really their problem, just that many sites don't bother to make sure everything works with opera.
besides obvious things like online banking, and microsoft junk, i've since a few weeks been having problems on facebook. lots of things suddenly stopped working, and it's seriously annoying....
I don't use Opera myself, but as far as I'm concerned, if Opera passes ACID, the problem is with your firewall's web interface. It's not Opera's fault your software is non compliant.
...It definitely feels faster than the other major browsers...
Especially since it remains fully responsive with much bigger number of open tabs than other browsers. So...you just open interesting pages in new tabs by middleclick where they load without locking the UI (Opera is quite multithreaded AFAIK) and wait, ready, for you (yeah, in that light I'm not that interested in Opera Turbo feature...perhaps when I'll be on 3G)
Plus it has several properly implemented ways of navigating said large number of tabs tabs (you don't have scroll tabbar or "window" menu, sidebar has treeview, and..."hold down RMB and, without releasing, move scrollwheel"), and also full keyboard navigation.
One that hath name thou can not otter
They say in their specs they do NOT compress https at all.
Those are encrypted pages you're requesting, which jumbles up the data. Jumbled data does NOT compress well at all. Plus, they're 'secure.' You don't want someone else handling your secure files.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Opera uses its own UI toolkit. Qt is only used in things like file selector in Linux version.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Wow, that critic seems oddly familiar
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
No it can't.
At those speeds, delivering internet pages is more latency bound than transfer speed bound. You always have to wait [your ping to the page] + [time it takes to transfer data to you]. With broadband, the first is usually larger than the last, so you won't get any speedup. Certainly not if you add an extra step to the mix, opera's server. Then you have [your ping to the opera server] + [opera's ping to the page] + [time it takes to transfer data to you through opera].
In short, Opera Turbo will only work when the time it takes to transfer data is way larger than the ping.