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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"
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.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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.
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
This outperforms every browser on the planet, especially over dialup or flaky wifi. As for the Acid3 test, it passes provided you squint hard enough.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"I don't browse the web often, but when I do I ... prefer to use Opera"
-the most interesting man
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
How well does Opera Turbo work with sites that use secure connections?
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.
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.
http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/03/13/
Eh, maybe.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
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"
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.
That's curious; I use Opera over FF because NoScript is too hard to configure for a site compared to Opera's equivalent, for my taste at least.
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.
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.
Pay? You are trolling it seems.
Quick way to get 30% Funny 70% Troll: defend Opera browser on
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.
so, the software somehow uses a gas or liquid turbine? I'm confused.
> Opera 10 proved itself to outperform every other desktop browser on the planet, and there are graphs to prove it.
Well damn, colour me impressed!
“To be or to not be, that is the question.”
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Fault is essentially irrelevant to anyone who has already purchased this firewall.
Tried the 10 and it still does not.
Well, duh.. it's not like a bug preventing the Web interface on x brand of corporate firewall to display is going to get high priority. Besides if the web interface fails I rather blame the coding of the interface then the browser, to write html that works in all modern browsers is significantly easier than to write a rendering engine that interprets fugly IE6 hacks "correctly"
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
Yeah, the rest of the world actually gets work done without using Opera.
No, "user" software should be slim and have only basic functions. Extra functionalities should come in form of plugins/extensions, so everyone can choose and install what they want, according to their needs and PC resources.
Dilbert RSS feed
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
I used to have a 33.6k dialup connection (that's all my modem did). What I ended up doing to speed up my web browsing and such was add as many of the damn advertiser websites into my hosts file. The advantages included never having to wait for a flaky doubleclick to respond, thus speeding up the page loading plus the obvious of never seeing the ads. The other trick I used to use was disable the loading of images and with IE I could at least get a placeholder to show where an image was. This really sped things up.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I find blocking scripts by origin globally to be sufficent. If I don't want your crappy ad scripts on one page, why would I want it on another? That, combined with Opera's block scripts on the site I'm looknig at, combine nicely.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I'm not an interface elitist or an apple fanboy, but I can't use software that gets on my nerves and Opera and Vista occupy the top two slots for that.
Sounds like an interface elitist to me. Possibly even an Apple fanboy, if you insist on "native widgets" instead of controls that are actually suited to a Web environment (for example, by responding to styling). Users of other platforms conceded the necessity of this long ago; only the Apple zealots hold out against it, and they hurt the Web by doing so.
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.
Hopefully the way things go will be something like this: The newest generation of browsers (Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Opera 10) all leave beta. They all pass acid3 (Chrome almost) and are standards compliant. Web developers can't resist all the HTML5 & Javascript goodness and a few killer apps start to support compliant browsers only. IE dies overnight, cue celebration scene from Endor!
"fastest network and UI performance and low resource consumption, and lowest reported vulnerabilities"...
That sounds like Lynx..
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
It may be irrelevant to the discussion of which browser best suits that organization's needs, but it isn't irrelevant to the discussion of which browser is best period.
Oh, and furthermore we use Fortigate where I work and I'm using Opera there right now just fine.
If F12 isn't doing it for you, try right-clicking on a page and editing site preferences.
Or, you could try blocking content - if you cannot select the elements you want to block on the page itself, you can always edit the list manually.
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.
Wow, that critic seems oddly familiar
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The turbo feature works by routing all your non https content via compression servers, which can ofcourse cause slowdowns: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/03/13/opera-10-alpha-now-includes-opera-turbo-compression/
This appears to be lossy compression that reduces image quality... Hopefully pretty much all html is compressed at the source these days: http://www.webreference.com/internet/software/servers/http/compression/
The latest Opera has a bittorrent client, an email client, an IRC client, an instant messenger, a spell checker, web developer tools such as UserJS and Dragonfly, RSS reader, voice recognition, mouse gestures, history search, content blocking, and on and on and on...
.. why is it that Opera packs so much more into less space than firefox, explorer, or safari, and how does that jive with your concern over resources?
The best feature of all: No AwesomeBar (mod me troll, please)
You stated that users should have a choice about features based on "their needs and PC resources"
"His name was James Damore."
Not really. My point was that posting a bug about it on Opera's site was the wrong move. The problem is (likely) with the web interface, not the browser. Call up customer support for the firewall and complain that the interface doesn't work with your browser.
Of course, they will have a canned "our product is only compatible with IE" response, but that is an entirely different problem.
34.180.255.64.in-addr.arpa. 300 IN CNAME 34.0-24.180.255.64.in-addr.arpa. 34.0-24.180.255.64.in-addr.arpa. 6835 IN PTR r02-02.opera-mini.net.
Why would I want to fill up their cache with my browsing habits?
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)
Uh, you can just go Preferences --> Advanced --> Content, and uncheck javascript, flash, plugins, etc. That should stop just about everything, no? And then you can re-enable it on a site-by-site preference. Takes about 15 seconds to re-enable a site.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
About Opera. Seriously.
Nobody except a total moron! Opera has been my browser of choice for many years because it blows all others into the weeds. It's fast, secure, fully customizable and has features (Wand, for one, and a nifty on-board email client) that make it stand head and shoulders above the so-called competition. It's also got serious geek value, as well.
I'm currently migrating to Ubuntu from (Ugh!) Windows, and one of the major factors in my decision was that Opera was available for Linux.
Yes, Chrome is good, as are Safari and Firefox, but Opera is the class leader by far.
Smivs on the intertubes!
The new automatic spell-check in Opera is nice too, glad they caught up to Firefox in that arena.
Little known fact: It was actually possible to add in a spell check using aspell and downloadable dictionaries.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
The summary states:
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.
But the link provided in that statement? They didn't even test Opera 10 in that study, until the very end of the article where it placed fifth, not forth. The link in the previous sentence is the one showing the 4th place results.
Don't get me wrong, I love Opera, but I hate sloppy slashdotting.
"When you see a unixer brainwashed beyond saving, kick him out of the door." - Xah Lee
If you don't like Opera -- fine, don't use it.
Which is, of course, what most of people do.
Thanks for clearing that up. If you hadn't I'm sure everyone would have come to the wrong conclusion.
Fear is the mind killer.
Right-click, noscript, allow slashdot.com -or- allow all. What's so hard about that? :-| Perhaps you didn't have the proper setting which is "allow top level domains by default". I made the same mistake at first but now it's made Noscript much more friendly and unobtrusive.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
None of these features are very extensive.
When I'm not at home, I just run OpenVPN, with compression on, and default-route everything through it -- either to my machine at home, or to a VPS that I'm not using for much.
That way, it's not just web, it's anything else I do, and it's all nicely secured. Ok, yes, I'm now trusting my VPS host, but better than trusting everyone else at the local Internet cafe.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The Linux version really uses Qt for the whole thing. The Windows version seems to use WinAPI. But I also read from somewhere else that there is a thin layer between Opera and the underlying toolkit.
I always thought that Opera uses Qt for graphics rendering on all platforms, but just happens to style its widgets on its own.
That's not how it works in reality though. Every browser ever made has bugs, sites will have to work around those bugs, and depending on the developers in question you might get one, two, or as many browsers as the developer is willing to test in, sets of workarounds.
Not to mention so much of the web is still a horrible mess of tag-soup where each browser vendor has had to make up support, and each other vendor has had to guess or reverse engineer what its competitors are doing.
Further to that Opera has, on at least two occasions that I remember, encountered examples of broken code because they support too many standards. Most notably in the case of when they introduced WebForms 2 support and several sites using previously non-standard values (the spec said all unknown values should be treated as "text") for <input type=""> suddenly were using values that meant very different things. There were also many problems caused because Opera was I believe the only browser to ever correctly support the third parameter of addEventListener(). Opera has since had to break its support because Mozilla concluded that too many sites would break if they implemented fully-correct support and ultimately I believe the spec has, or will be superceded with a version that reflects that end result.
And as a final point in my not-so-subtle suggestion that the biggest problem with site compatibility is actually web developers not knowing their job properly: Opera 10's user-agent is actually "Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.00" because several high-profile sites assumed that no browser would ever reach a double digit version number (Flash has also seen this problem in a few places since version 10 of the plugin arrived.)
Gotta hate wasting good money on a shitty product, eh? Caveat emptor.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Because Opera didn't invent the Reality Distortion Field. That was invented by Apple (Stever Jobs specifically).
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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."
I've been using Opera 10 for linux for the last couple months, trying the bleeding edge Opera 10 (upped to beta, not noticing much different behavior - tabs look great) and the latest stable 9. I had issues with 9, which is why I grabbed 10 early. The problems seem to be with specific sites, and I wonder if anyone has the same. As far as I can tell Opera cannot, for its life, deal with Slashdot. The browser greys out several times, I can't scroll smoothly, takes years to load. Ironically the Opera crew built in a feature where you just type "/." into the address bar to come here too. 9 and the bleeding edge of 10 also treated gmail poorly, when I move the mouse over an email's message box and click my middle button to paste something (which I can do over the subject and address fields) I get moved to a different page, losing the most recent typing. This was fixed for the beta realease and I am jumping with joy. Opera also likes to disappear when I click on the text box for messages on both gmail and Facebook and it hates loading google maps, sometimes just refuses. Google maps is still definitely an issue, but time will still have to tell about improvements to stability. For Slashdot and Goolge maps I usually give up and open a Firefox window, which is what I had to do to post (this morning it took 5 refreshes to get the title bar to show up, but the browser still greyed out several times). Crashes once or twice a day. Really too bad, it has some rad features (basically takes everything I liked in chrome and rolls it into something similar to Firefox, which is nice since there's no chrome for linux yet). Firefox still seems snappier too.
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!
It's interesting that they focus so much on this Turbo-Feature while completely ignoring some of the most critical differences between Opera and Chrome/Safari or Firefox even. I don't know about you guys, but I run a ridiculously slow machine. I literally surf the web with a Powerbook G3. This means that I am hyper-sensitive to how well a browser uses RAM and threading.
If you don't quite get what Opera's strengths are, try it on a slow computer. Then open up like 30 tabs. You'll understand why Opera is so awesome very quickly. You would need a godly amount of RAM and cpu power to do a similar thing with Safari or Chrome and Firefox is generally just sluggish no matter how you look at it. Running Opera Turbo basically gives you a full-blown cell-phone style browser on your desktop. Some people like to throw the entirety of their system resources at their browser, but for those who would rather their browser be a lightweight application running in the background, Opera is a very good alternative.
I am dead serious-- there is NOTHING faster than this browser for general browsing on a slow computer. I have tested the hell out of this. The only notable exceptions are Gmail and Facebook, which are so disgustingly javascript happy that I keep Safari 4 around just for them.
As far as I can tell, there's no reason to run Firefox on any system, unless you run your browser like IE6 with toolbars and extensions galore.
Yes, but the amount of traffic used by that will be dwarfed by the amount used on a desktop client.
Because obviously if Opera hadn't thought of some of the ideas implemented, then it would have been nigh impossible for somebody else to, right?
That's an excellent reply... ... to a hypothetical post witten in an alternate reality that had been phrased using the word 'never'.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder if they'll eventually go commercial with the Opera Turbo feature and offer for a monthly fee only. Try and make up the cost...
...in bed
That's some nice FUD, but Opera does them perfectly well. Opera's mouse gestures have always been the model for browser mouse gestures. History search works just like it should, content blocking is easy and effective, the web developer tools look awesome (haven't dove into them much yet). The few times I used bittorrent in Opera it worked perfectly fine. I stopped using email in Opera a few years ago in favor of Thunderbird, and I haven't used IRC, RSS, or voice.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Nice catch
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The original author of that got destroyed on his own comments page. I'm not sure if he decided to also anonymously troll Slashdot or if another AC decided to troll for him. He's even saying he's going to rewrite the article:
addendum: As an apology to the community for the reckless and inadequate review I will be doing it again, properly, taking into consideration your fine comments.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Bandwidth? Do you have any idea how many 56k users it takes to clog a 100mbit line, let alone multiple gbit lines? :P
Compressing that data takes CPU power, and memory to temporarily cache it. But considering the quad or octo-core servers we have available now, all packed with 48-192GB of memory.... this service could probably run fine off four to eight servers. Just scale it northward as you approach capacity.
Not exactly breaking the bank.
"In the fourth place overall, after Chrome 2, Safari 4 and Firefox"
Or said in a different way: no other browser performs worse, except IE.
And just like IE, it's still closed-source, proprietary software.
{{.sig}}
Okay, I realize RAM is cheap and plentiful.. but... Saying that Opera is better because uses 10x the RAM another browser uses is silly.
Firefox 3.5b4 with 5 tabs open, and has been running for around 5 hours, I'm sitting at around 200 meg, this is with around 5 extensions as well. Last time I had a couple dozen tabs open, it was still well short of 1GB, if I remember right, I think it hit around 700MB.
A simple web-browser using 1GB is stretching things a bit there. I rarely can even get Photoshop to hog that much memory. I think even running Fallout3 uses less than that. Hell, I've got Firefox, Digsby, iTiunes, some TSRs, and WoW open right now, and I've barely over 2GBs used. And I'm even using Vista currently, with its basically 700mb overhead automatically on boot.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
"Nobody gives a shit about Opera."
"Nobody except a total moron!"
You do realize the logical conclusion of this, right?
"Nobody except a total moron gives a shit about Opera."
An when you start with all that firefox extension bloatware to make it really useful - it starts like in 3-4 minutes.
On what, a TRS-80? And what makes it useful? The only "essential" extension I use is ad-block, the rest are mostly visual tweaks (stylish, tree style tabs), that I probably could live without. I don't know how your defining essential here, and I'm not sure you've ever actually used Firefox, since even in the Phoenix alpha it never took 3 minutes to load.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Since Opera 9.5, the browser has a new 'smooth scroll' feature that behaves as you describe. It may even be the default setting on the build you tried.
It's easily disabled from the opera:config page. Do a search for "smooth scrolling" from opera:config, then remove the check from the checkmark box.
They have 20 million Opera Mini users, 40 million desktop users, and very few desktop users will use Turbo.
Yeah, I wasn't sure myself. As you might have noticed, I'm pretty active on OsNews too. I was considering writing something critical about the review, but I figured other people would do it. Kroc, is generally a nice guy he just has some really strong opinions about some things. Even when I agree with him, I sometimes don't agree with the way he says it. But that previous statement could be applied towards just about everyone I know ;) So, it might just be me.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Something that prevents me from switching over to Opera is the FireFox addon called NoScript. I want to be in control of what scripts (such as flash and javascript) are being run in my browser. Many big sites are cluttered with those applets and swf's bringing down the perfornance and I'm happy to block 'em all out as this both cranks up the protection of my privacy a notch, gets a lot faster and a little less memory hungry.
Opera features what they call widgets (http://widgets.opera.com) which are claimed to be tantamount to FireFox addons but there is no such thing such as NoScript or FoxyProxy.
I haven't seen a lot of what he's written, but his review about Opera 10 is pretty pathetic. The entire review seems to focus on aesthetics and little else of substance, and apparently he has a hard time dealing with anything non-mac. Like I said, I'm not familiar with his writing, but that's the way the review makes him seem. I especially liked the part where he says that the color scheme he chose clashes terribly with OSX.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The spellcheck is great, but the dictionary seems to be very old. It doesn't recognize words like URL, internet, or slashdot. At least it recognizes OPERA, though I'm sure that's only 'cause the other uses predate the browser. =)
Oh, don't be pedantic! You know perfectly well what I meant.
Smivs on the intertubes!
Fault is essentially irrelevant to anyone who has already purchased this firewall.
Unless they want to get the fault fixed and so need to know who to contact?
Contact Fortigate and tell them their firewall is broken as it prevents Opera from working. If you contact Opera they'll probably say their browser works fine and tell you the way to fix it is to use a different firewall - mind you Fortigate may say something similar!
Outdated? It uses the OpenOffice dictionaries! :D
Clever signature text goes here.