Opera Dominates CNET Survey of "Underdog" Web Browsers

An anonymous reader writes "Whether you consider Opera an underdog browser or not, it came out on top in a feature on CNet this weekend. It was up against 'underdog Web browsers' Camino, K-Meleon, Shiira and Arora in a piece loosely aimed at determining whether these browsers are yet ready to steal significant numbers of users from Firefox, Safari, IE etc. Interesting most to me, however, is that it transpires that Shiira, the Mac browser from Japan, is one of the fastest browsers on the planet, beating the original Chrome v1.0, Firefox 3.5 and more in its benchmark tests."

Comments

Who cares how fast the browser is?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who finds that 99%+ of my time is spent waiting on DNS and data transfer and shit? I'm never actually sitting there, data downloaded, waiting for my browser to respond.

Re:Who cares how fast the browser is?

[CarpetShark]

Just use your favorite browser

Too often, this is the last excuse of IE-fanbois who've lost the security argument. Don't choose your favourite browser; choose a responsible browser. You're on a network with millions of machines. When experts tell you a browser is too vulnerable to use, stop using it.

Re:Who cares how fast the browser is?

[KDR_11k]

I'm an Opera user and I don't have a problem with too many tabs loading the system down, I do get some times of no response but that's usually when I've done something else and the browser got paged out by the OS and needs to reload itself.

Re:Who cares how fast the browser is?

[rs79]

"Am I the only one who finds that 99%+ of my time is spent waiting on DNS and data transfer and shit? I'm never actually sitting there, data downloaded, waiting for my browser to respond."

If you try Opera you can actually see what it's waiting on in the status bar. Usually you'll find it's waiting for a response from some lame ass as server - which if you're clever you'll alias to localhost in your hosts file.

Every time I use another browser I feel lost, staring at a blank page going "what is it DOING" as opposed to using Opera and saying "Oh it's stuck on googleanalytics. Again".

If your browser really had all the data it needed, it would render the page. Honest. In fact they render before they finish downloading.

Fast, but with a catch

[chill]

Sadly, it's riddled with bugs. The current full release wouldn't run on our Mac, and although the latest developmental build would, it suffered frequent crashes, making it hard to recommend.

I think that qualifies as a showstopper. It is, after all, a browser for a computer touted as "it just works".

We use Opera on a daily basis

[ducomputergeek]

It has a few interesting features, like being able to have the browser refresh a page every x seconds instead of having to code that in. Useful for the web-based admin panel that lets users request 3 hours of internet time at the coffee shop. We use it with Google Docs and Gmail as well as Pandora. Seems to use less memory than FireFox and it's not IE. It also seems to be stable enough to last days before having to be restarted. It even has a bittorrent client built in.

Re:Opera

[ale_ryu]

What? It's a private company, if they don't want to release their code you cannot force them, and there's nothing wrong with that, it's not like you don't have any alternatives.
I personally don't care if a software package is open source or not as long as it does the job properly, and I don't think it's less relevant for not opening up the source

Re:Opera

[SteelRealm]

Right, closed source and still more secure and less vulnerable then Firefox and dedicated to privacy and quality. Open Source is good as a concept and should obviously be furthered, and maybe Opera will eventually go Open source, but to want a company to burn and their quality product to die off simply because they want to remain closed source is probably the most childish thing I can think of.

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because other browsers have caught up with Opera's features, doesn't make Opera "less and less relevant."

Despite not being open source, be thankful for their innovative ideas.

Re:Opera

[gmuslera]

Probably most of what you enjoy today from your browsers have some origin in Opera. Not remember if was my main browser ever, but had been using it since 1996. Small, fast, secure, multiplataform, usually the most innovative in its own time (tabs, gestures, fast javascript, starting page with captures of your preferred sites, i think i saw all of that in opera years before than in any other browser, open source or not).

Would be great that it become open source (originally was commercial, then ads sponsored, then free, the evolution looks like going in that way), but anyway they did and keep doing a great work as they are, and you owe a lot to them even if never used their browser.

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source seems unlikely as Opera's main business is browsers for mobile devices and other devices that do not run normal OSes (like the Wii). I assume their various browsers share a good amount of source code with their desktop browser.

Re:Opera

[rs79]

"Personally, I hope Opera doesn't gain any further market share, because it is not open source. It is becoming less and less relevant."

And there you have it. Open source has now been elevated from a cult to a full blown religion.

"I don't care if it's the best, it doesn't mesh with my personal belief system, and must die".

Choices are good. I'd choose Opera even if I had to pay for it. It's good that poeple have choices.

http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer.html