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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"
Opera is a phenomenal browser. Seriously, they keep churning out useful features for their browser, and it's a pleasure to use. It definitely feels faster than the other major browsers, though they're all pretty good nowadays.
I'm using it since yesterday, and I had to disable Turbo mode, since all images were looking like crap, flash sometimes didn't work, some sites never finished loading (stopped at for example 18 element of out 25).
But I guess that for dial-up (people still use that? @_@) or crappy Wi-Fi it might be good.
Umm, perhaps you should take a look at what Turbo's intended usage is for.
I love Opera and have been using it since version 3 or something :)
But about the "new" Turbo thingy... isn't this basically the kind of thing that those dial-up "accelerators" did? Like compressing pictures and stuff? Because when I activate Turbo on Opera, the quality on image files degrades quite a bit, so I don't know if this actually much diferent from those "accelerators" of old age :)
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
Yeah, so much of my web browsing today depends on a number of Firefox add-ons that simply JFW for a variety of things. Opera could be the greatest browser on the planet, but without AdBlock Plus (no, a manually configured host-filtering hack is not equivalent) or GreaseMonkey, or any other FF extensions I occasionally find use for (FxIF, del.icio.us, TwitterFox, , I simply can't adopt it seriously.
The browser is eclectic, with too many preferences, too complicated preferences, too many customisation options. Features not everybody needs, or wants.
I'd rather have a browser that provides functionality that I do not (yet) need than a browser that's slimmed down so much it doesn't offer functionality that I do need.
If you don't like Opera -- fine, don't use it.
But please remember that not all people are like you, and some may like, want or even need what you despise.
If we would only write software with features that everybody or at least a majority of people would need, we wouldn't have any progress.
Fault is essentially irrelevant to anyone who has already purchased this firewall.
Opera has only been ad free since 2005. Back when it had ads it was definately worth the $30 or whatever for the full version. Just look at the competition (or lack thereof) it had during those years. I started using it back in the v5 days and refuse to give it up.
There is one thing that bugs me about this article though. They say Firefox is more customizable. The main reason I couldn't get used to Firefox (this was back in v1&2, dunno about 3) was because I couldn't customize the UI to look like what I was accustomed to without using poor quality addons. As far as I can tell Opera has always been more customizable "out of the box" than Firefox.
As someone who uses Opera, Chrome is inferior in many ways and I would never be willing to switch unless they are able to fill some serious gaps in features and efficiency (which yes, believe or not is not only based on your javascript score!). If you don't need an efficient browser with the fastest network and UI performance and low resource consumption, and lowest reported vulnerabilities, feel free to continue using whatever you're using, but please also remove yourself from this comment thread.
Who made you king of software? Users may use whatever available software they choose to. You can fuck off.
I beg to differ here. The initial install interface should be slim, sure. Have all basic functionality there and easy to use. Then, when you need more, I would just rather turn it on.
Opera is still a smaller download than Firefox (5.4MB for Opera 9.64, 7.1MB for Firefox 3.0). But has all the features of *dozens* of plugins. I personally find it extremely annoying to have to download a several plugins everytime I install the browser on a different machine. With Opera, it's all there.
As far as resources, Opera needs fewer resources than Firefox, especially when you start talking about plugins. Sure, while I'm running Opera I usually use something close to 1GB of RAM. But I have literally dozens of tabs open. And if I didn't have as much memory available, Opera wouldn't use as much and I could still have all the tabs open. I know, because my home machine and my work machine are about two "generations" apart and Opera is just as performant on one as the other.
About Opera. Seriously.
Really? That build of FireFox you're using today would be barely recognizable if Opera had never come into being.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Tabbed browsing is 1994. Thats right... 1994.
Surely the Mozilla folks picked up on the idea soon after, right? Well, no.. Netscape 6 (Mozilla 0.6) was released 6 years later but did not support tabbed browsing. It was only in 2001 that there was even a hint of a decent browser comming from them that would have tabbed browsing, which they were calling Phoenix (later to be called Firefox)
Great ideas surely can be thought of by multiple people, but it very much seems like even when they don't have to do ANY of the thinking, it takes more than the idea... It also takes the will to implement it, which even the Mozilla boys seem to only do after years and years of the killer feature being right in their face.
Not only does nobody else but Opera seem to be innovative, it doesnt even seem like the others can even recognize a good idea when they see it, requiring years and years of sinking in.
I'm glad that the mozilla boys finally listened to the raves.. I'm sad that I have to include the word "finally" in there.
"His name was James Damore."
So, have you got some specs for exactly the way IE and Gecko handle every single case of non-standard code? Including cases where it's clear the code is broken, but it's not clear what the author meant, and multiple interpretations are equally valid?
No? There's no specification? They'll have to reverse-engineer it by visiting every page on the internet with IE and Firefox and seeing what those browsers do with them? Gee, that sounds workable!