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

How to get turbo browsing with free software

[Ed Avis]

Back when my net connection was a 56kb/s modem, I used to make an ssh connection (with compression) to a machine at university, and then tunnel through that to the university's http proxy server. That gave a handy speed increase compared to making http requests directly over the modem link. You could also try the RabbIT compressing web proxy. All this relies on having a server somewhere with a fast net connection that you can run programs on - and this is the service that Opera Software are really providing.

Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software

[commodore64_love]

>>>That gave a handy speed increase compared to making http requests directly over the modem link

That's not quite the same. The summary read: "Opera Turbo shrinks pages before sending them." If it operates like my Netscape Web Accelerator, it squashes everything. Text is shrunk to about 5% original size, images to around 10% original size, and Java and other executables shrunk to 20%. This approach makes my 50k dialup have an apparent speed equal to my 750k DSL connection!

The only drawback is that the images, when compressed, look like crap but if you're only interesting in browsing the internet for information, not the pron, then that's okay and acceptable.

Turbo looks buggy

[paziek]

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.

Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[noidentity]

For some reason I thought Opera was a pay browser (or had ads or something making it not free-as-in-beer). Yesterday I happened to visit their page and apparently it's offered without charge for desktop platforms (and without source code, of course). Ironically, it's the only browser that still supports the older Mac OS X 10.3.9; Apple's own Safari hasn't for years, and Firefox 3.x doesn't either.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[SausageOfDoom]

Well with the bandwidth bill they'll have after this little venture, I don't think you'll have to worry about them for too long.

Re:Squid + Gzip

[IBBoard]

Yeah, from one of their pages it is basically a proxy server with added compression (not just GZip since a lot of servers can deflate content anyway).

Since it isn't part of the Opera browser but is actually an Opera-run server, I wonder how long it'll take for someone to write a Firefox extension that piggy-backs on to those servers and gets the speed increase itself? :D

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, you realise both those extensions you mention come as standard in Opera...

It's called Content Blocking and UserJS in Opera world, and existed LONG before Mozilla got around to copying them....

Re:Phenomenal browser

[amicusNYCL]

besides obvious things like online banking, and microsoft junk,

Microsoft, probably more than anyone else, has actually gotten their act together with regard to Opera. It used to be that they were actually delivering Opera a separate stylesheet to manually move everything off the page and mess up the margins, but now I can even use the MSDN articles just fine with Opera. I certainly don't miss an opportunity to rub my Opera user agent string all over their logs.