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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
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm using it since yesterday, and I had to disable Turbo mode,
I, too, had to disable Turbo mode. I found that I couldn't play some games with it enabled.
But, damn, 12 Mhz is FAST!
My blog
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.
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.
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 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.
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)
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.)
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."