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"

Comments

Phenomenal browser

[Jarlsberg]

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.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[Anonymous Coward]

[T]he other major browsers [are] all pretty good nowadays.

Largely because they've copied features originally introduced in Opera.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[AaxelB]

You missed my favorite Opera feature, which for some reason nobody ever mentions and I try to bring up whenever it's relevant: full-text history search in the address bar. It's like Firefox's awesome bar but actually awesome and incredibly useful (e.g. finding a recipe I looked at two weeks ago by typing a few ingredients).

The searching can slow things down a bit, so it's best on an excessively-built machine. On my desktop I took the extra step of putting the cache in a tmpfs partition (kinda like this) and set it to remember the max of 50000 pages, and it runs as smoothly as a baby's bottom (sorry, that simile turned out grosser than I intended).

Re:Turbo looks buggy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Ugly.

[moronoxyd]

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.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[sznupi]

Mehhh...in every thread about Opera those misconceptions.

Adblock - http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/ that's basically the same list that Adblock addon uses. It certainly blocks everything just as well. And the functionality itself is built in, no messing around with plugins. According to my buddy who moved from FF to Opera, style file works slightly better at hiding empty spots. And, if something isn't blocked, you have a nice way of blocking this and similar elements through Opera UI.

GreaseMonkey - you do understand Opera pioneered also this functionality, right? Check UserJS (it is capable of running many GreaseMonkey scripts btw)

FxIF - built in. Didn't it ever occured to you to just right click on the frakking image and bring up properties?

del.icio.us, Twitter - something wrong with bookmarklets placed within one click, on navigation bar?

I guess the main problem of Opera is that people assume, because of beeing used to other apps, that there's now way it can pack so much in so little executable, so properly/speedy implemented.

Re:Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[kextyn]

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.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

About Opera. Seriously.

Really? That build of FireFox you're using today would be barely recognizable if Opera had never come into being.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[Rockoon]

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.