Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha Is Out, and It's Fast

sgunhouse writes to let us know that, following a leaked internal build over the weekend, Opera Software has now released their official 10.5 pre-alpha. There are no Linux versions yet. And an anonymous reader adds, "Opera's 10.5 pre-alpha includes the Carakan JavaScript Engine. Benchmarks now show that Opera is competitive with Chrome, beating it in Sunspider and other tests. Safari, Firefox, and IE are all behind. This is still pre-alpha, so further speed gains should be expected."

Comments

complete whats new and opinions

[sopssa]

Complete What's new:

Carakan
Carakan is our new JavaScript engine. It’s fast, more than 7x faster in SunSpider than Opera 10.10 with Futhark on Windows (Mac optimization is not as far along). You can read more gritty details regarding register-based bytecode, automatic object classification and native code generation in the Opera Core blog.

Presto 2.5
We are now using Presto 2.5, which contains a huge numbers of improvements. It also includes support for CSS3 transitions and transforms, and more HTML5 features like persistent storage.

Vega
Vega is our new graphics library. It’s currently software based and displays everything you see on-screen. Vega can be hardware accelerated, but as you can see from the complex graphics benchmark in Peacekeeper, we don’t seem to need it yet. (Note that Futuremarks Peacekeeper test does no include the results of their complex graphics tests in the overall score. We believe this is wrong in 2009 and will simply be silly if not changed in 2010.)

Outside - Platform integration
On Windows 7/Vista, you will notice a lot of visual changes and use of APIs which allow the UI to display the Aero Glass effect. For Windows 7, we also added Aero Peek and Jump List support to easily access your Speed Dials, Tabs, etc. from the Taskbar.
For Mac, a complete rewrite in Cocoa brings an Unified Toolbar, native buttons and scrollbars, multi-touch gestures (try 3-Finger Swipe Left/Right or Pinch to zoom) and a bunch of other small details. We also added Growl notification support.

“Private tab” and “Private window”
You can open a new Private tab or Private window that forgets everything that happened on it once closed.

Non-modal dialogs
Dialog boxes (JavaScript alerts, HTTP authentication, etc.) are now non-modal and are displayed as a page overlay. This allows you to switch tabs or windows while the dialog is still displayed. Similarly, the Password Manager dialog is now anchored at the top of the page won’t block any content as it loads a new page.

Address field and Search field improvements
Both fields have been upgraded in looks and functionality. They can now remember searches, support removing items from history and show results in a better layout.

Opera just keeps getting better and better. It was in some Opera 10 beta that they improved the JS engine a lot, and now they've improved it over 7x again, along with the on-screen drawing. That's what I've always loved about Opera; UI responsivess and the smoothness of browsing (scrolling, mouse gestures) beats every other browser and everything is thighly packed in, so no need for clumsy addons which quality and speed differ a lot.

However, the preview images seem to have the Windows 7 like layout. I really hope this is just to show it off and it can be switched to normal - I like having my menubars easily accessible.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Errol backfiring]

Can you switch the HTML5 "features" like and persistent storage off? When I read the HTML5 specifications, it seems to be mainly made for advertisers...

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone actually reads TFA?

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[nschubach]

Too many links to click... it's easier to scroll to the comments. Most of the time they have better information anyway. ;)

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[dunezone]

Wheres the killer feature?

Firefox gained popularity because of Tab Browsing and being free. IE lacked Tab Browsing till 2006, and Opera was still Ad-Driven based by the time Firefox was first released in 2004.

I am not saying its a bad browser, but why should I switch over from Firefox? What does it have that Firefox doesn't and don't tell me obscure HTML 5 features that are not used yet or speed. Firefox is still pretty fast and acceptable.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[ShatteredArm]

If you hate karma whoring so much, why do you post anonymously? Worried about your karma?

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[samkass]

So the pre-alpha version of Opera is faster than the competition, but how does it compare against the pre-alpha versions of Safari, Firefox, and Chrome?

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares? If you're logged in and your karma isn't already maxed out, you're probably a dick.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[ShatteredArm]

I personally switched over a few years ago because, at the time, Opera was the only browser with built in speed dial, mouse gestures, email, RSS, etc. without any need for third party extensions with security vulnerabilities. Those were the killer features for me.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[piquadratCH]

It was in some Opera 10 beta that they improved the JS engine a lot, and now they've improved it over 7x again

Makes you wonder what those guys from pypy could do for Python if they got some proper funding

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[mdwh2]

I started using Opera before Firefox existed - long before it became trendy to switch from IE.

I'm not saying Firefox is a bad browser, but why should I switch over from Opera? Where's the killer feature?

(PS - Opera had tabbed browsing way earlier too, although it didn't use that terminology. And if you want an example of something Firefox still doesn't do, you don't have any flexibility over arranging the tabs, they always have to be full size, where as Opera allows you to resized the tabs, allowing you to view them side. Of course it's not a killer feature, but for heaven's sake, it's 2009 - browsers are mature, and no one browser is going to have a killer feature anymore.)

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[GooberToo]

They might be killer features for other users too if you explain on what some of the buzzwords mean.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Anonymous Coward]

is nice for advertisers, but it's a lot better for end-users. The current method of tracking clicks, involves Javascript "hacks" that can't be controlled by the client. Either you accept the tracking or you have to completly disable Javascript.
With the browser can offer the user a simple button to turn off the pinging.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[HBoar]

I switched from FF when Opera 10 was in beta. I don't think there was any one killer feature, but it's UI responsiveness in linux was probably the main reason. At the time, it was a huge improvement over FF. I believe FF has improved a lot since then, but I'm sticking with opera due to a number of little things I like -- Speed dial, built in bookmark sync, built in (and fairly decent) email client, a "paste and go" option on the right click menu..... etc. None (or few) of the features are unique to opera, but they are packaged together in a browser that is very competitive in terms of speed under both linux and windows.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Kartoffel]

Sounds like you're competing with Mozilla Navigator, not Firefox. If Opera comes out with a _web_browser_ without email, IRC and kitchen sink, yet with extensible addons like Firefox, then I'll consider it.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Anders]

Wheres the killer feature?

For some reason, Opera does not have killer features (it had tabbed browsing for ages, and was ridiculed for its MDI UI). Features only become indispensable when someone else copies them.

Mouse gestures, vertical tabs, speed, no plugin conflicts, customization -- those are some advantages that I remember. These days I stick with Firefox because it's not too bad, and it's there by default. And RAM is cheap.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[ShatteredArm]

So, let me get this straight... You want Opera to compete with Firefox by stripping out features, and adding a feature that will allow users to install those former features, which are the same, except built by untrustworthy third party developers? I suppose if that's what you want, Opera is not for you.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[shutdown -p now]

However, the preview [opera.com] images seem to have the Windows 7 like layout. I really hope this is just to show it off and it can be switched to normal - I like having my menubars easily accessible.

It's nothing new - they've had the option to hide the menu bar for God knows how long (since 7.x, I think? maybe even before that), it was just buried deep - it was an UI command with no key bound by default, so you had to bind it first. In 10.0, they've added the option to hide main menu to the menu itself. And in this build, they've made that setting the default, but you can, of course, change it back (and generally change the UI to look like it used to be).

Note though that menu is still accessible with mouse only - that Opera logo in top left corner, when clicked, shows all the items normally displayed on the main menu in a popup menu. In that, it's quite similar to Ribbon "pearl" button. So it's better than IE, where you have to use keyboard (Alt or F10) to activate the hidden menu.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[richlv]

Dialog boxes (JavaScript alerts, HTTP authentication, etc.) are now non-modal and are displayed as a page overlay.

woohoo. does that also include download dialogs ? excellent if it does, lame if it doesn't.

also, i'll use the chance to point out things i'm annoyed about opera (being opera user since version 3, 4 or so, exclusively).

1. inability to disable refresh for history httpd pages. my current major annoyance. i've set history mode to 3, i've explored every other history option - nothing helps. can somebody from opera software who reads this help me, finally ?

2. new one - i can't find out how to customise opera to be more useful :)
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=302392

3. a pretty old one - "reload every" functionality got silently regressed, and nobody really responded on why usability was so seriously fucked up on this one.
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=225510

other than these i'm a quite happy opera user for many years and i'm excited about performance improvements for sure.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[hkmwbz]

It's faster than the latest Chromium build. Firefox is not even in the same league.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Zerimar]

It's faster, according to Lifehacker.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[richlv]

erm, wait. tabbed browsing was brought to masses (avoiding "invented" here) by opera.

for me, it's mostly relatively low memory usage, built-in features that you have to hunt firefox plugins down for (mouse gestures and whatnot) and some features ff is missing (although there might be some obscure plugin for them, like tab previews, tab closure undos etc).

major feature is ability to set pages from history to be always loaded from cache, which allows to recover forum/slashdot/tracker/bugzilla messages if some problem occurs - although a major gripe of mine is inability to do this with https sites. that sucks. on the other hand, ff sucks even more badly at this.

then there's (built-in) ability to disable all images by default (enabling cached only ones !) and switch this on tab basis easily - awesome feature when using dog slow gprs.

oh, and opera was the first mainstream browser that introduced "persistent" browsing by saving state of your open tabs and restoring that upon next startup. a feature opera users got used to several years before firefox got this as a basic feature - no idea about msie.

in general, opera has indeed pioneered most of the features in modern browsers. being a passionate opensource user, opera is still the last bastion of proprietary software in my toolbox, despite of some major annoyances with it - which basically means all other browsers are even more annoying.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Kjella]

But I'm guessing no HTML5 video since that is pretty much stranded on the codec issue. That's the one thing I'd like to get rid of flash...

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[hkmwbz]

Firefox's "killer feature" was that it was released at exactly the right time, during the big IE security scare where everyone was looking for a free replacement. Opera had tabs ages before Firefox did.

Opera is smaller, faster and with features better integrated and streamlined. It can do what prety much most of the most popular Firefox extensions can, and without everything breaking with each release. Oh, and it's crazy fast and has the most responsive UI, period.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you didn't read the right specifications, or you have a very poor understanding of them and web development in general.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[trapnest]

I don't see any buzzwords. Maybe "speed dial" Maybe.
But that's not really a buzzword.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[trapnest]

I've honestly found that all browsers suck. Opera and Chrome are the least annoying, imo.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Korin43]

The problem with Mozilla was the absurdly long startup times because it was so bloated. Opera starts up faster than Firefox does for me (with Adblock and Firegestures installed), so I fail to see what the problem is.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[camperdave]

browser: A piece of software used to access information on the internet.
built in: included as a normal part of the whole.
speed dial: Not sure what this means in this context. Normally, a button on a telephone that dials a sequence of numbers rather than a single digit.
mouse gestures: a means of controlling a software by motions made with a mouse.
email: a means of transmitting messages over the internet.
RSS: a protocol for collecting short descriptions of changes to websites so that the user can decide whether to view the website or not.
third party extensions: enhancements made to a program by people other than the program author, or the program user.
security vulnerabilities: weaknesses in a program that make it possible to retrieve information, or run programs without authorization.
killer features: slang term for characteristics, elements, or traits that are so highly valued that things not having these traits are considered not worth having.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

major feature is ability to set pages from history to be always loaded from cache, which allows to recover forum/slashdot/tracker/bugzilla messages if some problem occurs

Is that on a per-page basis? Because you can do it globally in firefox with "Work Offline" under the File menu, I can't think of a time that feature wasn't there. I think it was even there in the netscape days.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[xmundt]

Sounds really good, and, in general, I like Opera (and use it almost exclusively). However, I HOPE they will have finally cleaned up the memory issues that gradually suck up every byte of available RAM over time.
          Oh yea...there is also the problem that, even when masking as FireFox, I cannot get http://www.skyandtelescope.com/ to work properly. It will not allow me to log in, and, has problems with the interactive star chart...So...Firefox it is. And I will not EVEN talk about trying to use Godaddy.com....
          But, again...I really like Opera and am hanging onto it!

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera 10.x/10.5 still needs to improve drawing using canvas (html5) - way too slow. Safari and Chrome run circles around Opera and Firefox. IE is not even on the field. Since all this is still very new, Firefox and Opera will definitely improve, but for now they could do with an improvement in this area.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[jp10558]

Except if you like MDI, you should head over to the Opera Beta Forum to vote to get it back in 10.5, because they are thinking of dropping it because no other browser does it. Which, IMO, is stupid.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[jp10558]

And I have to say, in Firefox 3.5.x, it still can't get restoring the tabs back after a crash right some noticeable amount of the time on Windows XP. I go through more of the "This is embarrassing, I can't get your tabs back" (AND WTF, because they are listed in the little list) in one week that I have in Opera since I started using it in 2001.

I honestly don't know what the problem is with FF, but it seems laughable to me. I don't even think about tab restore in Opera anymore - and haven't in years. In fact, I never close pages because they just come back when I re-open the browser. I've had the same browsing "session" for years.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[jp10558]

Am I the only one who thinks the Ribbon "perl" idea seems like a fix for a problem almost no one ever had (the old standard menu bar)? And generally is a worse implementation because it adds an extra click for no apparent reason?

Also, I must be the only one who got used to double clicking on the title bar to restore/maximize the window - how do you do that now? Have to hunt for a new button somewhere that is hidden in a drop down?

I know I'm a power user, but really, if I wanted a fisher-price OS and software, I'd go to Apple.

Now on to my Microsoft RANT:
They are the reason for this abomination that is the ribbon. While everyone else is trying to save space, they're bloating things, except when they've decided to totally change all their interfaces so they screw everyone who *ever used Windows before*. I mean, at least Windows 95 was an improvement, but the best new thing in Win7 that I can see is the built in search in the start menu (if you can even call it that, because now it's some sort of pop-up explorer window that YET AGAIN behaves differently depending on where you're in the menu (Top level vs All Programs)). Why? I mean, I could teach myself and most users GNOME, KDE, ICEWM or OS X with the differences between Win95 - Win7 interface. AND unlike in XP, you can't get it back. Win 7 default interface gives me nightmares of some unholy union of KDE 4 and Final Fantasy 10.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[jp10558]

Have you tried contacting the sites? They might be able to fix it faster than Opera can. If we remember the big FF push to tell sites things don't work in the browser, then we know it's a two way street.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

That's what I've always loved about Opera; UI responsivess and the smoothness of browsing (scrolling, mouse gestures) beats every other browser

Sorry but Chrome murders Opera on UI responsiveness, smoothness of browsing, and speed in general. I dumped Opera months ago because it feels laggy next to Chrome. I dearly miss mouse gestures but I expect that Chrome will get them eventually.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[shutdown -p now]

Am I the only one who thinks the Ribbon "perl" idea seems like a fix for a problem almost no one ever had (the old standard menu bar)? And generally is a worse implementation because it adds an extra click for no apparent reason?

The idea of Ribbon (and similar UI solutions) is that all functions that are frequently used should be one click away, and this may be achieved by stuffing some functions that are rarely used further than they used to be.

In case of browsers, at least, I wholeheartedly support this - I've had main menu disabled in Opera for a very long time. I never use it. Why would I want to?

Also, I must be the only one who got used to double clicking on the title bar to restore/maximize the window - how do you do that now?

Surprisingly enough, you double-click the title bar (or whatever is left of it, anyway).

Or, you use the normal maximize/restore button in the top right corner of the window

I know I'm a power user

If you're a power user, why would you want the main menu? Don't you just use keyboard shortcuts (and, in browsers, mouse gestures)?

They are the reason for this abomination that is the ribbon. While everyone else is trying to save space, they're bloating things

Sigh. Not this myth again.

Office 2007 Ribbon is narrower than the default set of toolbars in Office 2003. And, of course, you can minimize it (and just use the shortcuts).

Regarding your other complains - hopefully you can understand that a single UI won't work for everyone, and the natural way of handling this is to make it work better for most people, even at the expense of the few who got used to the old (and often less efficient or less intuitive) way.

If you find that Win7 shell UI isn't to your liking and annoys you way too much, well, it is still replaceable as it had been since Windows 95, and there are plenty of alternatives. Heck, you can run Blackbox if you want.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Idiomatick]

"built by untrustworthy third party developers"

I didn't see those words anywhere in what GP said. I think official addons would be good for Opera as well as for FF.

I actually think a handful of the most common addons in FF SHOULD be made by the FF team. It would lower memory leaks, vastly increase speed, and close a bunch of security holes.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[jp10558]

I know I'm different. I use the menus all the time for Bookmarks, IRC Chat, Window Menu (slowly going to the Window Panel for find as you type), Tools menu and View menu. I also use the MDI Window Minimize, and close buttons. I suppose I could now learn keyboard shortcuts, but that's harder than using the menus for now. I'll be honest too, Office 2007 looks bigger to me, but I don't use Office enough to care right now, but I am annoyed everyone else is doing this App Start Menu thingy.

I don't really want to re-shell Windows, again if I was going to mess with the guts of an OS, I'd just do Linux to save money.

I do understand a single GUI doesn't work for everyone, so WHY IS MS removing CHOICE in the UI? How does making millions painfully re-learn an interface they barely understand or have in muscle memory a more efficient method? Do you know how many users come to me because they can't figure out how to get to a program when they change computers and the desktop ICON doesn't follow them? I just had a trouble ticket because a user got a new XP box, and he had the XP rather than classic menu, and couldn't find how to get to the file browser.

Google sometime, these are not isolated incidents or a few users. I have to believe these are most users.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[iserlohn]

You have a point.

All road cars pretty much have the same control layout. You wouldn't want next year's model to swap the accelerator and brake pedals, would you? Nor would you want to find out that your friend "customized" his car controls to do the same when you're trying to rush him to the hospital in his car.

Beyond a certain point, incremental improvements in ease of use is not worth destroying *consistency*. When I click on the Edit menu, I'd like it to return a standard list *every* time, not just showing the 5 most frequently used items.

If you think about it, all user interfaces are just a means to an end; unless, of course, you're a user interface designer.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[hairyfeet]

But I would say it is the wealth of plug ins that give FF its "killer feature" when compared to Opera. I don't want to surf the web YOUR way, or the way the IE or Opera teams decide is best, I want to surf MY way. With Firefox I have ABP, I have ForecastFox at the top to warn me of bad weather in my area, I have Noscript to allow ME to decide what does/doesn't run, iMacros for automating web forms, Downloadhelper and Downloadstatusbar to put Youtube videos and other web vids where I want them to go, and finally FEBE to back everything up nightly so it is easy peasy to sync my FF between my flash and my desktops.

So while I have tried Opera at just about every new release, and have my oldest nephew swear by Opera, for me it just feels like I have to do everything THEIR way. And there is enough software in this world I have to work around because their way doesn't fit me, I don't need something like a browser which I spend a lot of time on to fight me too.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Anonymous Coward]

It IS being compared to the pre-alpha versions of Safari, Firefox and Chrome. That is what it's faster than.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[interkin3tic]

I personally switched over a few years ago because, at the time, Opera was the only browser with built in speed dial, mouse gestures, email, RSS, etc. without any need for third party extensions with security vulnerabilities. Those were the killer features for me.

Just wait a year and those features will be in firefox. A few more years and they'll be in internet explorer.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[interkin3tic]

Wheres the killer feature?

The porn tabs... er, I mean, the "private tabs."

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[interkin3tic]

I honestly don't know what the problem is with FF, but it seems laughable to me. I don't even think about tab restore in Opera anymore - and haven't in years. In fact, I never close pages because they just come back when I re-open the browser. I've had the same browsing "session" for years.

Between this and the positive experiences I've had with microsoft onenote, I feel like I'm letting open source software down.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Kartoffel]

Exactly. Where are Opera or Chrome equivalents of Greasemonkey, Adblock Plus, Ghostery, FlashGot, NoScript, Torbutton etc? For that matter, where the hell is the SOURCE CODE?

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Rockoon]

Opera can run greasemonkey scripts.. Opera simply calls them User JavaScript and has had this ability since version 8 (yes, thats a year before greasemonkey existed) Invented here.

Opera doesnt have anything as nice as Adblock Plus, but it hasnt required a plugin for content blocking either. Invented here, but not the best implementation.
Ghostery has been ported to operas User JavaScript. Yes, its just a script.

NoScript? Disable scripts (and plugins, and pretty much anything else) globally, then enable them on a site-by-site basis with Site Preferences. Invented here.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[hairyfeet]

But see, you are just illustrating what I was talking about, in that you have to do it THEIR way. Killing scripts globally and then adding them by site helps exactly jack and squat. What if I just want A to run on the site, but not b? No choice, it is all or nothing. With Noscript I can allow just the content that I WANT, and nothing else. And I have found ABP cuts down my customers infections by a good 65%+ since so much malware comes through infected website ads.

But the point is Firefox is NOT "just a browser" it is more like a framework, which is why we have Seamonkey, Kmeleon, Flock, Songbird, all running on the Firefox framework. Sure you can just download FF and off you go, but as I show my customers where Firefox really shines is the easy ability to add or customize features so YOUR browser is what YOU need, even though it might be completely different from what I want. some of my customers use the social addons, so all their sites like Facebook are right there in a sidebar, others like me use iMacros for easy scripting of commonly used tasks.

The point is that while Opera is nice, and may have had some things we take for granted "invented there" the fact remains that you still have to use Opera THEIR way, just like IE. But I have enough "fun" dealing with workarounds for software that won't behave the way I WANT, and I don't have the time or the skills to build something as often used and important to me as a web browser, but with FF I don't have to. Because with Firefox having the web MY way is only a few simple clicks, with thousands of plugins to choose from even my 67 year old dad can have HIS browser HIS way, and I can have mine.

That is what makes the Firefox framework brilliant IMHO. For the first time we are not dependent on "hacks" or "workarounds", we can just add the plugins we need, and leave the ones we don't. So while I will keep trying alternatives like Opera, Safari, and chrome, I'll always come back to Firefox, because everything from the UI to the behavior in Firefox is completely customized for ME, not anyone else. And that is really a nice feeling, you know?

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[hyartep]

opera is nice and i use it sometimes. however, i really miss awesome bar from firefox

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[XO]

... the tab browsing that Opera had long before anyone else. Firefox is a giant Frankenbrowser mish mash of crap with no clear focus as to what they are trying to achieve. It is horribly slow, and sucks a metric assload of memory.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[ShatteredArm]

Why should I wait, when they're available now? The only reason for that would be brand loyalty. It's not like learning how to use a new browser is rocket science.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[interkin3tic]

Another one of those comments that was clear in my head but now I see wouldn't make sense to anyone else.

I actually meant that as a commentary on how other browsers follow Opera's lead. I definitely did not mean to imply you should wait years rather than learn a new browser, one that's as easy to use as opera especially. I only use opera, actually, it was meant to be praise.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[XO]

The more you use good non-open source software (when you can find it) the more you will realise that there is not a single piece of good open source software, at least, nothing in the popular ranks.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[XO]

Who cares where the source code is? Are you a competent dev?

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[interkin3tic]

But see, you are just illustrating what I was talking about, in that you have to do it THEIR way. Killing scripts globally and then adding them by site helps exactly jack and squat. What if I just want A to run on the site, but not b? No choice, it is all or nothing. With Noscript I can allow just the content that I WANT, and nothing else. And I have found ABP cuts down my customers infections by a good 65%+ since so much malware comes through infected website ads.

I have to agree with this. The opera method of adding exceptions to the no script rule is not equivalent to noscript.

On the rest, however, I have to disagree. I've found opera to be very customizeable and flexible where I need it to be, which is in adding menu buttons here or there. I wouldn't know where to start making my own plugin for firefox or any other browser. For some users like me, not having to search for and install new plugins is a bonus. Since I only use opera, "their way" is the way I learn and is much better than I could have come up with. I can't compare it to firefox, so I don't know if the firefox way is usually better. Even the features I would want that opera doesn't have, you've got to give them half credit for the workarounds.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[XO]

well, you have no extra clicks with the single button menu bar, because you click on it once, find the thing you want to select, and click on it again. Same with the old system. (the sub menus auto-open) Also, how many things in the menu do you ever ACTUALLY use? I've used perhaps two things on the Opera menu in the last year, that I can think of. Tools->Advanced->Cookies, and Tools->Appearance. Once for each one. Everything else, I'm not sure that I've used in several years. I actually just turned off hte menu bar, realising now that I can do that in 10.0, without going to the INI files to do it.

Win 7 is great, if you switch the Taskbar back to XP style, IMO. Although I'm not really a big fan of the super small title bars.. I guess I'll get over it.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[XO]

... until you load both gmail and facebook at the same time in Chrome, and it sucks up all available memory on your system, and dies.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[BrokenHalo]

If I have a problem with my browser (or any other piece of software, for that matter), the last thing I want is relics from the last session getting in the way when I re-launch it. I prefer to start from a known-good state. Firefox has the ability to recover tabs etc if a particular site crashes the browser, and that's usually good enough.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Randle_Revar]

I guess I see why you start-stop types like Opera and Chrome, but once I start X and a few terms, the next thing is SeaMonkey, and then it stays open, with just a minute or so down time to install the update every few days (since I use nightlies).

And I would argue that Firefox's start up is just un-optimized, not due to bloat - SeaMonkey seems to start about as fast FF, so I think is just Gecko, which definitely isn't bloated.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Randle_Revar]

In this case speed dial is having the start page display thumbnail shortcuts of maybe 6-12 pages...that you use frequently? or maybe the last ones you had open? something like that. Chrome and Opera have this natively, and yes, FF has an extension for it (which I think might get uplifted in a version or two).

Personally, I don't see the point - I have bookmarks, collections of bookmarks (open all in folder) and normally I am just using session restore anyway.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Randle_Revar]

Really? Over here on Linux, session restore has worked perfectly since 3.0 (I have seen that dialog maybe twice, and they came back fine anyway). But then, the Flash 10 64-bit beta on Linux seems to be more stable than the released Flash 10 on Windows...

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Randle_Revar]

Not sure about FF 1.x, but FF2 and 3 are/where faster than Opera (maybe not anymore...)

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[richlv]

it's global. and it's completely different from offline mode.

it basically means that when i go back in my history, my browser does not reload pages, but instead shows them as they were - which is perfect for me. as mentioned, i can recover comments if some error happens, see previous status messages in different systems etc.

this does not work across sessions, if i close and re-open browser, it reverts to page listing (which seems to be pretty much what firefox does).

this is not the default behaviour, i have set my history caching to the most aggressive option available, because i find it to be so massively useful. my biggest gripe, and one i have cursed opera developers about a lot - this does not work properly with https sites, even if i have unmarked "always reload https" option.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[richlv]

definitely. it's "packaged" vs "stick these pieces together yourself".

as a linux user i'm quite used to putting things together myself (using slackware for many years). on the other hand, if we are talking about a single software package, i prefer it to come with all the functionality.
i don't have to rely on dozens of separate developers (many firefox plugins have single dev only) to keep on releasing new, compatible versions in an orchestrated manner - which almost never works that way.

looking at the ff plugins you mentioned :

abp : i've blocked most annoying ad sources in opera manually (it's damn easy to do), and i don't see the annoying ads. i do not block plaintext ads, unless i'm on a very slow gprs link, where any single connection takes several seconds, even if it's retrieving a couple of bytes. while having the list maintained for me might be easier, i'm fine by current approach. at least i don't have plugin developers try to sneak their own ads through...

forecastfox : i'm using kweather. i prefer keeping generic functionality out of single app, which is also why i'm not using any opera widgets.

noscript : while this is not as optimal in opera, there has been ability to quickly switch global js/plugin (including flash) and java status, as well as override it on a per site basis. noscript has this better, but current status in opera satisfies my needs.

imacros : that might be useful. opera has some functionality like that, but i never got to trying it out.

download stuff : i either use opera download manager, which is one of the best in browsers, or wget for longer downloads on servers.

febe : probably what opera link is (?). not using that.

now, what i'm getting to - it's all included. i don't have to search for these plugins to get this functionality (you didn't mention mouse gestures and probably a shitload of other functionality - i'm not browsing w/o mouse gestures anymore).
it's all available right there, with a single download.

now, hunting down and installing plugins once might not be that bad. the problem is with _updating_.

i've been using thunderbird since version... 0.2 or 0.3. it crashed badly and ate my mails at least once (i had a backup). but it has improved a lot in that regard, and i still use it. but i use version 2. why ? i downloaded and run version 3. it said that it is incompatible with 4 of the plugins i use - out of 4. great. 3 went the rm way, 2 is here for a while.

plugins are the strength and weakness of firefox. many are great, many are unique or best - if they are maintained and if they are compatible and if they work for you. if not, they count as missing features.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[richlv]

i don't code at all, but source code would benefit me. you probably knew that and were trolling :)

both security fix backporting and long term reliability (imagine some evil company like ms purchasing opera) would benefit from source being available.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Anonymous Coward]

then there's (built-in) ability to disable all images by default (enabling cached only ones !) and switch this on tab basis easily - awesome feature when using dog slow gprs.

Don't forget Opera Turbo when using dog-slow GPRS.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Lord Bitman]

opera did tabs right before firefox ever came out- and firefox still doesn't have proper tabbed windows -- because firefox is open source, and open source people don't like the back-end implementation of MDI interfaces, so open source people don't use MDI, despite it being a holy grail in usability for the web

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[hairyfeet]

Uhhhh..."not having to search for new addons"? You go tools>addons> and they give you a nice recommended list with the most popular this week. If that isn't what you are looking for you pick "browse all addons" on the same page and they have them all nicely sorted by function. I mean how much more easy could it possibly be?

But I think the problem of their way VS your way is pretty summed up in your final sentence "Even the features I would want that Opera doesn't have, you've got to give them half credit for the workarounds." That right there is the problem: You always end up having to deal with workarounds because no matter how good the developers are the users will find use cases they hadn't thought of. Like Opera's scripting whitelist, which as you pointed out is piss poor compared to Noscript in Firefox.

But hey, if Opera does the role you need it to do, I'm really happy for you. I know folks that are just fine and dandy with IE and don't see the point of trying anything else either. But the extensions framework can give you a fully customized experience, so much so they can give you features you didn't even know you really needed, like FEBE, which backs everything up automatically and makes it trivial to carry my entire updated browser on a flash stick. You really ought to give the Firefox extensions framework a spin. You can just browse and see if anything catches your eye. One of the nice things about Firefox is that uninstalling an extension is as simple of picking uninstall from the addons tab. No muss, no headaches, no risk.

So why not give it a spin? All it costs is a little time, and you may end up with a completely new browsing experience that fits you like a glove. That is why I can't switch to Opera, or Safari, or Chrome. I am too used to having the web delivered to me MY way to have to deal with "workarounds and hacks" again. That to me is much harder and more of a PITA than simply surfing through the extensions looking for cool stuff.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[sopssa]

It's a lot faster than bookmarks, hence the "speed" dial. I use it for things I frequent, like slashdot, weather and tv calendar. Yes, I could have them open with all the other tabs too, but whats the point when you don't use them so often and it's fast to open them with speed dial.

I use bookmarks for things I want to remember and have around, but very seldomly need.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[sopssa]

That's why theres a dialog box when you start Opera where you can choose what kind of state you want to launch (or one of the saved states)

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[JasterBobaMereel]

IE was insecure, old and not mving ...

Opera cost money (then) and had a reputation (then) for not rendering all sites correctly (mostly because they were IE centric)

Firefox was free and rendered the vast majority of sites correctly

It's the old story of it does not need to be better just good enough

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[JasterBobaMereel]

My experience with the ribbon interface is that people either love it and do not understand how they ever did without it ... or detest it and continually complain they cannot find anything

There seems to be a knack to using it and if you "get it" then it works..... this is a *very* bad design for a supposedly "intuitive" interface?

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Lomegor]

YOUR way means with add-ons made by other people? Isn't that the same that what's shipped with Opera? Chrome has extensions too now, so, are you switching? If the only reason is add-ons, you may realize that Chrome gives you a better customized experience much faster. (And the customization of Opera is way greater that that of FF -obviously without considering changing the source code and compiling your own version-.)

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[hkmwbz]

No, Firefox 2 and 3 were definitely not faster than Opera. Remember, Opera 9.5 was the fastest browser at the time. It had HUGE performance gains over the previous version. Then Safari and Chrome got their new JS engines. Now Opera 10.5 is here, and back at the top. Firefox never really competed in the performance department at all.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[GooberToo]

What an uninformative dick - and the moderators who modded you up are complete idiots.

Thanks to you, I know nothing more I didn't already know and everyone who has read your post is now dumber for it.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[hairyfeet]

Chrome has too many privacy concerns, and I don't like how it installs other software like Google Updater that it doesn't remove when you uninstall it, and in fact have to go through hidden folders to actually toss ,so chrome is right out. Maybe if I wanted to go to the trouble of using SWIron and didn't mind always being behind, but it seems like a lot of work just for Webkit.

As for the Firefox framework being the same as what is shipped with Opera? Not even close my friend, not even close. The plugins designed for Opera are very few in number, and very primative as well, probably due to the fact that it is closed source so developers basically have to "hack" it. For example are there any plugins that will download FLV videos, transcode them on the fly to my preferred format, and place them in a separate folder from my software files? Because Videodownloadhelper does that, and quite well. From what I have seen the best Opera can do is a dialog box that pops up that requires me to copypasta the complete website address for the particular video (which depending on the site can be a royal PITA) and even then it often simply doesn't work at all. It is bad enough even my oldest boy, who swears by Opera, gave up on downloading videos from Opera without "hacking" and uses Orbitdownloader to "workaround" the lack of decent FLV downloading in Opera.

And why would you actually care about speed with a decent connection? My 2Mbit cable renders a page as fast as I click on it, seriously why would I care? I certainly can't click faster than the page renders and with Firefox everything renders as fast as I can click, so what could I possibly do with faster? And the customization of Opera is better? Can I have some of what you are smoking please? Firefox has over 5000 plugins to choose from! Show me the download page for Opera that has anywhere close to that! Being able to change a button layout simply doesn't compare to the things you can do in Firefox, everything from editing code with Firebug and advanced automation with iMacros to integration of live radio like House of Blues to controlling my media player with Foxytunes.

So while I am glad that Opera works for you, and you can argue about Presto VS Gecko rendering, which as I said I don't see how rendering faster than the under 3 seconds I have now would actually be helpful, comparing changing a few buttons around in Opera, or the piss poor whitelisting or frankly lousy plugins, to Firefox just equals big can o' fail. Even on its best day Opera simply can't touch Firefox when it comes to customizations, and frankly it never will. Why? Because it is closed source, which means ultimately if the developers don't hand it to you on a plate, which you will HAVE TO take their way, well then you just can't have it. Anyone else trying to write for Opera have nothing but "hacks" and "workarounds" to deal with, simply because they don't have the source and thus can't integrate functionality at a "bare metal" level like you can with the Gecko engine.

So sorry, nice try, but about as lame as comparing that lousy ad filtering (which you have to download third party files and "hack" into Opera) to the excellent ABP. There is a REASON why Firefox is currently #2 and Opera has a little bitty marketshare. It is because like IE it is Opera's way or no way at all. The only reason Google has gotten any traction is because they are Google and can advertise Chrome to every single user of Google Search. But their attitude towards privacy leaves something to be desired in my book. Ultimately to Google the product is only the lure, it is the datamining that is their true goals. No thanks, if I wanted Webkit I'd use one of the free non privacy invading ones like QTWeb.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[hkmwbz]

Firefox didn't actually render the sites correctly as such. It was the sites that were designed to work with the latest Netscape version, and Firefox used the same engine. So it got free compatibility from sites.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Honestly, it only sounds trivially different from offline browsing - seems like you would get the same behaviour by switching to offline mode before going through your history and then switching back when you are done. I suppose it would be convenient to have it happen automatically in case you forget to switch and then blow the cache with a new page or error page instead.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Rockoon]

All those extensions are still the way someone else wanted, unless you wrote those extensions yourself. Did you?

The poster I was responding to didnt even know that these features existed in Opera. Of all things, he begins with a direct knock-off of an Opera feature. This feature, as you may not know, is capable of implementing most firefox extensions.

With your NoScript diatribe, I see that you havent actually investigated yourself either.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[jp10558]

My point is instead of
1) Point at menu + Click
2) Click on what I want

It is now
1) Point at menu expander
2) Point at menu I want
3) Click on what I want

And I have to do this *every* time I want to access a menu if I use the new interface. Then again, I guess I've overestimated how many people actually use menus in apps they use, so maybe it isn't a big deal. That said, what exactly are you gaining? 30 vertical pixels?

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[BalleClorin]

-1 troll

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[camperdave]

Okay, I googled it. Speed Dial is basically a grid of thumbnails of your nine favorite or most visited websites. The thumbnails are presented instead of the blank page you would normally get when you add a new tab. By pressing ctrl-1..9 you can quickly load that particular website in the new tab.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Simetrical]

Opera is smaller, faster and with features better integrated and streamlined. It can do what prety much most of the most popular Firefox extensions can, and without everything breaking with each release. Oh, and it's crazy fast and has the most responsive UI, period.

Have you tried Chrome? Its UI seems about as responsive as Opera's to me — meaning no perceptible lag at all. Likewise on rendering/JS speed, although that's harder to gauge and is a much more rapidly-changing landscape right now.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[Randle_Revar]

>faster
I guess. The two collections of bookmarks I use on clean startup are on my bookmarks toolbar, so it is two movements and two clicks to open 25+ tabs

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[hkmwbz]

Chrome's UI is snappier than Firefox, but not Opera. Especially with 100 tabs open. Actually, Chrome can't even seem to handle that many tabs, while Opera does it with ease.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[badkarmadayaccount]

Adblock Plus is more efficient than Ghostery, with proper subscriptions.

I tried it out earlier

[pwnies]

...and was quite impressed. Very snappy, a better UI, some very nice tab management capabilities (ability to tile tabs horizontall/vertically, not sure if this was in previous versions or not). However the one thing I was even happier about was their new vega library. If you didn't read over the summary, it's a new graphics library that they're using for 2d animation/rendering which has the capability of being hardware accelerated. If you've tried out the direct2d build of firefox, you'll know how nice this is. Pages animate and scroll so smooth you'd swear it was warm honey running down Kiera Knightly's body.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[rxmd]

Pages animate and scroll so smooth you'd swear it was warm honey running down Kiera Knightly's body.

I'm sure your nice metaphor will appeal to the tech crowd here, but if you've ever try running warm honey down anything, body or otherwise, you'll realize it is not the metaphor you want to use if you want to describe smooth rendering behaviour on a computer screen :)

Re:I tried it out earlier

[Ethanol-fueled]

Mmmmmm, but can it be warm honey running down Brittany Murphy's body instead?

Nom nom nom.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[Mystra_x64]

Hardware acceleration is not enabled yet.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[pwnies]

Something tells me that'd be cold honey very quickly.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[Compuser]

What do you mean by "ability to tile tabs vertically"? Did they finally add vertical tabs on the side of the window rather than on top? I am too lazy to install alpha releases so it would be nice to know from someone who has gone to the trouble.

And I agree with other comments: the first thing I think of when presented with an image of honey on skin is "sticky" not smooth.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[ShatteredArm]

That's a morbid fetish you have, given that she's dead and whatnot.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[pwnies]

http://i.imgur.com/vvhxP.png Here's what I'm referring to when I say tile. It allows you to show multiple tabs at once in the main rendering window. Quite nice for large, widescreen monitors.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[AliasMarlowe]

Did they finally add vertical tabs on the side of the window rather than on top?

This was already in earlier versions. I use it in 10.10 in Linux.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[tautog]

It was lifted from a top gear episode.

http://www.jeremyclarkson.co.uk/jc-top-gear-quotes/

OP probably has never a) experienced warm honey doing anything or b) seen a female body, warm or otherwise.

Come on, either make up your own quips or at least attribute the most obscure ones...

Re:I tried it out earlier

[ZERO1ZERO]

Pretty surethis has been in Since about Opera 1. It was/is one of the features of Opera, having a full MDI interafce, where the tabs aren't just tabs, but actual windows that can be displayed together, resized, tiled, cascaded etc etc.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[ZERO1ZERO]

Crap I just looked at the link, and ou seem to be right that 'tiling' is a new thing apparently ? Or maybe just a new way to display it?

Re:I tried it out earlier

[mdwh2]

Indeed, in fact it's been in Opera for years, and probably the very first version that had "tabs", since they far more sensibly used standard OS features (e.g., MDI on Windows) rather than writing a custom windowing system.

Later on they also added their own custom windowing system ("tabs" rather than MDI or whatever), but I don't see the point. It was probably in response to criticisms that "tabs were better than MDI" from Firefox fans, but that makes no sense to me. Judging by the screenshots it looks like the latest change is doing this with their "tabs", but it seems like a waste of effort to reimplement what they already have.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[shutdown -p now]

Tiling itself isn't new (Window -> Tile Horizontal/Vertical was there since 1.0), but in previous versions, when you tiled the windows, it worked precisely as in any other Win32 MDI application - you'd see two "child" windows, complete with title bar and other chrome, positioned one after another; if you then dragged the border of any window, only it would resize (possibly overlapping the other windows). Now, though, they've got rid of the child window chrome, and make it look more like a bunch of frames (or windows in a tiling window manager).

Re:I tried it out earlier

[lagfest]

I got mod points, but I couldn't find +1 disturbing.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus Kiera Knightly's body is so flat, warm honey would just puddle and not run anywhere fast.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[jp10558]

Yea, they dropped the Windows (or whatever) OS Standard windowing system to write their own, that does less in this Alpha. Stupid IMO. I wish someone would convince Opera that just because everyone else does it way X, they don't need to change how they've done it for ~13 years to way X (Which is often inferior or at least not obviously better!).

Re:I tried it out earlier

[calculadoru]

Dude, get your blondes sorted out.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[Idiomatick]

In windows you just right click the taskbar and click show winds side by side... I'm sure there is a hot key for it too. Linux has similar functionality. Why include the feature in the browser when you have one OS wide that works just as well?

I suppose it saves space in the address bar and such but that seems relatively minor.

And if you are going to say, they are tabs in the same window... that isn't an issue. At least in FF you can drag a tab to the taskbar and voila, its in a new window.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[Anonymous Coward]

Pages animate and scroll so smooth you'd swear it was warm honey running down Kiera Knightly's body.

Delightful though Ms. Knightly is, it's probably worth pointing out that said "warm honey" would not have it's path inhibited by breasts or anything -- nope, a completely flat path there!

So in short, Kiera Knightly is way below my standards! :D

Re:I tried it out earlier

[Anonymous Coward]

Pages animate and scroll so smooth you'd swear it was warm honey running down Kiera Knightly's body.

I'm sure your nice metaphor will appeal to the tech crowd here, but if you've ever try running warm honey down anything, body or otherwise, you'll realize it is not the metaphor you want to use if you want to describe smooth rendering behaviour on a computer screen :)

Okay. How 'bout some hot grits?

Re:I tried it out earlier

[XO]

Open the Sidebar on whichever side you like to have your "Tabs". Turn off your Tab bar. Open the "Window List" in your sidebar.

Alternatively, you may now be able to move the tab bar to the sides, I've never tried.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[shutdown -p now]

Later on they also added their own custom windowing system ("tabs" rather than MDI or whatever), but I don't see the point. It was probably in response to criticisms that "tabs were better than MDI" from Firefox fans, but that makes no sense to me.

They never actually removed MDI; it is still there in 10.10 today. You can take any "tab", right-click on it, and select "Restore", and you'll get the usual MDI window, with title bar and other usual chrome, resizeable etc. Tab will still be there, allowing you to quickly switch back and forth.

It's just that the MDI "Window" menu is disabled by default (but can be enabled in settings).

Tabs for Win32 MDI applications aren't new, either. I've wrote quite a few myself. It is a fairly cheap way to get tabs - just take MDI, and stick a tab control with zero-height pages on top of the client area, and sync the selection with that with current active window.

Oh, and Opera using standard OS features? Would be pretty tricky to do for a non-native application - and any written in Qt is that. Some really old Opera versions were native, but Opera 5 was already using Qt (2.x back then, I believe). So, no, its MDI wasn't native for years. It just looked like one - and still does, if you ignore the tabs (or kill the tab bar - which you can do).

Re:I tried it out earlier

[sephus]

Wrong. Opera (I used to work for them) only use QT for the Linux version -- the Windows version has always been native.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, somebody's about to get scarred for life.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[kextyn]

The tab bar can be placed on the top, bottom, left, and right. This has been available for many versions. When I started using Opera it defaulted to the bottom so when they changed it in 6 or 7 I just put the tab bar back at the bottom. I'm not sure why but it bugs me to have the tab bar at the top in Opera but I deal with it in Chrome.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm...

Pages animate and scroll so smooth you'd swear it was hot grits running down Richard Stallman's pants.

You're right, that does work! I'm getting all tingly just thinking about it.

It's fast but buggy

[mantis2009]

I'm a regular Chrome user. I've tried Opera 10.5 pre-alpha for the last few hours, and I find it at least as snappy on my regular rounds of javascript heavy websites. I also really like the trend in browsers toward simple UI, with no real estate wasted on menubars. The new Opera looks almost as minimalistic as Chrome. Nice. However, be warned, this early build really is wonky. Lots of small errors and things that simply don't work. Don't uninstall your main browser just yet. But, I think you might be able to rely on this pre-alpha build of Opera as your (superfast) gmail client, and then have another browser open for your browsing needs.

Re:It's fast but buggy

[Anonymous Coward]

>pre-alpha
>buggy

Duh!

Carakan is cross-platform

[A Friendly Troll]

Carakan is cross-platform. That cannot be stressed enough. Since Opera is used on a *lot* of devices, from mobile phones, over fridges (!) and airplane entertainment centres, to the Wii, this is truly a major step forward for Opera.

Looking forward to the final release!

Re:Carakan is cross-platform

[nschubach]

With all these improvements to Javascript bytecode, how long will it be until it replaces conventional VMs? Should I even worry about learning Clojure (which I just started on) if Javascript bytecode is becoming fast enough to develop on?

</hypothetical hat>

Re:Carakan is cross-platform

[jamesswift]

Because Clojure's aim as a general purpose language is to help you leverage parallelism with no locks and minimal state.
Javascript is for something else entirely.

You might even write Clojure code to emit Javascript.

Re:Carakan is cross-platform

[shutdown -p now]

Regardless of performance of JavaScript VMs, JS itself is far from a perfect language. Too many quirks, and oftentimes too verbose syntax, especially when you compare it to the likes of Clojure or Ruby.

As well, regardless of any JS perf improvements, it's not going to beat a statically typed language. JVM is still faster, for example (once it loads).

Re:Carakan is cross-platform

[Anonymous Coward]

"Carakan
Carakan is our new JavaScript engine. It’s fast, more than 7x faster in SunSpider than Opera 10.10 with Futhark on Windows (Mac optimization is not as far along). You can read more gritty details regarding register-based bytecode, automatic object classification and native code generation in the Opera Core blog."

doesn't sound too terribly cross platform to me especially considering both of the named systems are based on the x86 architecture, sounds to me like it will have to be optimized on every architecture/OS independently.

Does it have Adblock?

[MrMista_B]

I hate to keep harping on this, because I hate Firefox, but I hate intrusive ads even more.

And by 'Adblock' I don't mean 'sorta like Adblock but not really', but something that straight-out duplicates the functionality, allowing be to block any element of any website anywhere, with nothing more than a right-click and perhaps a wildcard.

Please, someone save me from RAM slaying bloat of Firefox!

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[negRo_slim]

Please, someone save me from RAM slaying bloat of Firefox!

I hear ya there bro, all these pristine gigs of DDR2 I have in my machine... It's so beautiful, would be a shame to dirty up all them bytes by loading something into it.

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[micksam7]

Yes.

Right click, choose "Block content", then select elements on a page you'd like to have blocked. Flash, images, iframes, what have you.

May not be as complete as AdBlock, but it's certainly useful.

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[benjamindees]

Please, someone save me from RAM slaying bloat of Firefox!

Aside from a few sites (cough), I have never witnessed Firefox being anything but snappy and responsive on any OS with a reasonably-powered machine. How much RAM do you have?

Firefox on Linux always works well, and on Windows I've seen it use ~250 MB before, but that's fairly reasonable for the average Windows machine these days. I don't consider my machines to be particularly well-spec'd (a couple are nearly 10 years old), but I'm not trying to run Windows with only 256 MB of RAM either. What am I missing?

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[binarylarry]

I think he was looking for more a preemptive block, not so much something you do after you've seen the ads already.

Kind of like a Shoryuken to web advertising's Hadouken.

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[daveime]

I hear ya bro, you've got 2 gigs, you might as well fill 350 megs with bytes to display about:blank.

Hang on though, which bytes are actually needed to display an EMPTY PAGE ?

Even considering he's storing the DOM which is basically a set of empty containers for js, document head, document body, css objects etc., why in fucks name does it take 350 meg ???

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[mister_playboy]

Fanboy's list works great.

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[mechsoph]

You can block the ads via hosts file: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera has a built-in "Ad-block-like feature": Right-click on an empty area of the page, select the option to block content, click on your hated ad, ???, profit.

Also, there are several ad-block plug-in-ish software for Opera. Try this: http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/

Or just google "Opea adblock"

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[moronoxyd]

I use an (older) version of AdSweep to get rid of more than 90% of the ads, and Opera's own block content function for the few things that still annoy me.
Yes, it's not quite AdBlock+, but close enough.

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[Icegryphon]

Shoryuken will only get you so far, Most likely when you come down you are going to eat a Hadouken.
Prefered method would be a Tatsu-maki Senpuu-kyaku nowadays since you will go through any wave motion fist Shenanigans.

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[Rockoon]

You have fewer tabs open than most people?

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fanboy's list works great.

I second this motion.

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[Anonymous Coward]

No but...

Right click, choose "Block content", then select elements on a page you'd like to have blocked. Flash, images, iframes, what have you.

May not be as complete as AdBlock, but it's certainly useful.

Fixed

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[Anonymous Coward]

Support sites you like, keep their ads.

I mean, skip sites with obnoxious ads.

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[merreborn]

Install 6 extensions (especially firebug), and actively browse in at least 6, if not 12 tabs for a day. If your memory utilization doesn't hit AT LEAST 500 meg after 8 hours, call the editors of the Guiness Book.

This may sound like an extreme usage pattern, but it's all to common for anyone doing any sort of web development.

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[benjamindees]

I have never used tabs. I always open new windows, because in Netscape that used to actually spawn a new process and crashing one window wouldn't bring down all the rest. That has since changed, but it's a habit I got into. I can have up to a couple dozen windows open at a time, but like I said I don't notice ridiculous memory usage or any impact.

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[ya really]

1. get the ad server list here: http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers
2. add list to your host file
3. reload browser
4. enjoy the benefits of adblocking without a plugin

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[Idiomatick]

Anyone else notice this?

GP: (making fun of people afraid of using their ram)
Parent: but but my beautiful rams~! You're using a 6th of it to run what probably consists of 80% of my time spent on the computer.

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[XO]

I'm running Opera with 58 tabs open right now in one window, and 12 in another. 267MB. Hmm.

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[daveime]

If anyone is spending 80% of their time on the computer looking at about:blank, then they're doing it wrong.

Think about it. If you were writing a C++ struct or something to hold the structure tree of something (for example, an essentially empty DOM for an HTML page), and it took you 350 megs to do it, then you'd be a pretty poor programmer.

A linked list of (zero) objects should never take more than 2 words (8 / 16 bytes depending on your OS) ... one word to define the current count of objects in the list i.e. 0, and one word to define the pointer to the first object i.e. 0 or NULL or whatever.

about:blank pseudo
DOCUMENT
    HEAD
        SCRIPTS = 0
        CSS = 0
        META INFO = 0
    BODY
        CHILD HTML ELEMENTS = 0

Why does this take so much memory ? And note this is not just Firefox, this is ALL browsers ... FF just seems to be one of the worst offenders.

Throwing more memory at something should always be the last option. Optimise, optimise, optimise !

God, I sound like Balmer now :-(

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sort of yes. It's not "Adblock" but you can prevent the browser from loading content from any URL pattern you like by using their Blocked Content feature. You can do this by clicking on elements on the page, or by entering the patterns yourself. Also, both globally and for any site (URL pattern) you can configure things like if you want to run scripts and what priveledges you give them, run addons, load images, cookies, referrer, browser string, frames support, css support, custom css, etc, etc. That's for every site. I love that.

Then again, maybe other browsers support that too, but evey one I've tried was either buggy, slow, or didn't run on all my platforms so I haven't looked back since about 2000 or so and not once yet been able to tell me "oh, your browser doesn't support X?"

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[Randle_Revar]

On my Linux system, SeaMonkey is using about 830 res, one FF is 830 res, and the other FF is about 190 res. But I have somewhere over 100 tabs open (5 windows) in SeaMonkey, 136 in FF and 46 in the second FF. With my 4 GB of RAM, I am not hitting swap, so I don't really care.

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[nitio]

I have never witnessed Firefox being anything but snappy and responsive on any OS with a reasonably-powered machine

Define reasonably-powered machine. I have C2D 2.1GHz / 2,5GiB RAM / Running Snow Leopard and Firefox is anything but snappy and responsive. And I'm not even talking about 50+ tabs open with 50% of them running Flash. I'm talking about 2 windows with about 10 tabs each with mostly static pages (that is, no AJAX or something).

Firefox still exists in my computer because of my banking needs. Otherwise Chrome does the job perfectly and, guess what, snappy and responsive - can't wait to try this Opera beta though.

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[Zoidbot]

Firefox is a massive resource hog. With more tha 2 tabs open for a while, it will consume vast amounts of memory.

Opera is a breath of fresh air. 10.10 is rock solid and fast, 10.50 is (currently) unstable, but faster than anything around, including the previous king, Chrome, and Opera have already said there is still more gains to be had and planty of debug to remove.

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[Idiomatick]

Optimize, optimize, optimize !

That's fine. But optimizing involves questions and assumptions. Surely if you have the assumption that people have 500MB of ram to spare then they should be optimizing speed. Drive space isn't at all a concern for browsers so all you have to choose between in ram usage and speed. I'm comfortable with FF using 300~600MB of ram depending how many windows and tabs I have open... because I will generally have that much to spare for the browser. I'm willing to spend that much ram to have shit move 1/50th of a second faster.

Alpha

[MozeeToby]

This is still pre-alpha, so further speed gains should be expected.

Isn't the opposite ussually the case? Alphas and betas are often a bit quicker than the final releases. I've always assumed it is an artifact of trying to tie off issues quickly right before release so maybe this isn't ussually the case with the Opera dev team?

Re:Alpha

[ArsonSmith]

No, many features aren't fully implemented and there are shortcuts that avoid blocks of required code. This is why not all pages are rendering properly. Once these get fixed it will seem to slow down in order to fill all the requirements.

Re:Alpha

[ezelkow1]

This is what I assume as well. At this stage most of their logic is pretty sound and I dont think any of their engines are going to drastically change, however as they start adding more things running in the background things are going to start slowing down more. Generally you would think the major logic behind an app is done first then all the pretty things that slow it down and functionality that is bolted onto it is added later.

I remember this being the case with xp, tried out a beta on a 400mhz box with 128mb ram and it ran snappy and just fine. Final release comes around and it is definitely not the beta it once was.

Re:Alpha

[Rockoon]

Alpha's and Beta's also usually have debugging/trapping stuff in them so that users can more easily report problems, so there really isnt a general rule that alphas and betas are usually faster, or usually slower.

I'll say this tho.. I ran Opera 10 alpha for quite some time before the official release, and the official release was just as snappy.

Opera has always been snappy. It is arguably the best browser available and has always been a trend setter. They are playing a little bit of follow the leader this time, but they again seem to be doing it just as well if not better.

Re:Alpha

[hkmwbz]

No, they won't slow it down in the final version because they actually optimize the code.

Re:Alpha

[shutdown -p now]

Isn't the opposite ussually the case? Alphas and betas are often a bit quicker than the final releases.

I don't know what software you're using, but on any normal code, alphas/betas aren't quicker at all, simply because they often do not have asserts and other similar checks compiled out to assist in debugging, diagnosing crash reports, etc.

Re:Alpha

[hkmwbz]

No, final releases are usually more optimized.

Re:Alpha

[fbjon]

It is arguably the best browser available and has always been a trend setter. They are playing a little bit of follow the leader this time, but they again seem to be doing it just as well if not better.

Wow. That gave me a double whiplash. :)

Re:Alpha

[hkmwbz]

What things would they add that would start running in the background? If you don't add mail, the mail client won't be "running" so it won't affect performance. They add all the features, then they optimize the hell out of them. How did you think Opera got to be this fast (older versions)?

Re:Alpha

[ezelkow1]

As stated above

No, many features aren't fully implemented and there are shortcuts that avoid blocks of required code. This is why not all pages are rendering properly. Once these get fixed it will seem to slow down in order to fill all the requirements.

Who knows what threads arent running currently and what features are turned off in the browser that normally would be.

Re:Alpha

[hkmwbz]

No, many features aren't fully implemented and there are shortcuts that avoid blocks of required code. This is why not all pages are rendering properly. Once these get fixed it will seem to slow down in order to fill all the requirements.

Again, they aren't shortcuts that make things faster. They are bug that actually often make things slower.

Who knows what threads arent running currently and what features are turned off in the browser that normally would be.

We know that features you don't use don't actually affect performance, so that's irrelevant.

Opera 10.5 isn't fast because it does shortcuts or lacks features. It's fast because the Opera devs know how to write fast code.

Re:Alpha

[AaxelB]

It is arguably the best browser available and has always been a trend setter. They are playing a little bit of follow the leader this time, but they again seem to be doing it just as well if not better.

Wow. That gave me a double whiplash. :)

Heh. How about, each final release of Opera is arguably the best browser available at the time. Right now, however, new versions of other browsers have superseded Opera's stable release (version 10 was good, but quickly overtaken). They're playing catch-up, but looking at this pre-alpha it appears they're doing a damn good job of it.

Sound better?

Re:Alpha

[ArsonSmith]

you stick to wishful thinking and I'll stick to reality and history lessons.

Re:Alpha

[ezelkow1]

Again, they aren't shortcuts that make things faster. They are bug that actually often make things slower.

There arent shortcuts that make things faster? If you cut out a part of an algorithm that isnt completely necessary for usability but sucks up alot of cycles that would not make things faster? As the parent said its quite possible they remove things that mean it isnt rendering everything properly but does make it faster since it isnt rendering everything properly. Im sure as I have, that many people have experienced a beta product that was faster than the end result for this reason. Not everything that is in the final version is running in this beta. Whether it be part of an algorithm for rendering a page or a whole thread handling bookmark management or god knows what else.

We know that features you don't use don't actually affect performance, so that's irrelevant.

I did not mean features as in an entire mail client, I meant features as in things under the hood you never see that handle various things the browser uses, those type of threads, not entire email clients or instant messaging clients. So you cannot be entirely sure you will not be using a thread that I was talking about earlier in the end result of opera, just that it is not turned on at the moment.

Re:Alpha

[jp10558]

I always thought in the Alphas and Betas, all the debugging code would slow it down over a release where that's been disabled. Certainly I've seen betas get faster for final release.

Re:Alpha

[ezelkow1]

What debug code that slows stuff down? I dont know about other people, but at least where I work debug code that may possibly be released to beta testers or customers only consist of a log, a simple print out to a file. If your doing enough of those to actually affect performance than either your logging way way to often or you really dont understand the problem to begin with and your logging isnt going to do you much good anyway.

Re:Alpha

[XO]

lol, um, no. alphas and betas are full of debugging facilities that will not be present in the final. as well as the code itself getting tweaked to run better.

Re:Alpha

[Anonymous Coward]

You said it right, arguable.

I've tried every browser released for my platforms, pretty much, and haven't moved away from Opera since 2000. Mostly because other browsers are either slower (Chrome was faster but didn't handle turning on and off flash on a page-by-page basis when I tried it) or had fewer or harder-to-use features that *I care about*. Like being able to specify my custom css (most pages use horid fonts and colors), block any content by pattern (without a plugin), toggle flash and scripting by URL pattern, etc. Maybe they're out there, but every time I give thema try, I go back for some reason or another.

Yeah, it's probably true, there's a browser out there that's got something Opera 10 doesn't, but they're still not at the ponit where I would call them "superceding" Opera.

Re:Alpha

[Randle_Revar]

What? The FF 3.0 alphas and betas where slower than 3.0 final, same was true for FF 3.5, and expected again for FF 3.6

Re:Alpha

[hkmwbz]

Ah, so debug code doing all sorts of checks and logging will NOT slow things down, but final, optimized code will! Your logic sucks. You are just an ignorant troll.

Re:Alpha

[hkmwbz]

Again, Opera does not operate that way. Final versions are even more optimized than alphas and betas. This whole discussion is pointless because you are making false assumptions about Opera based on your own ignorance. They do not remove things that are not rendering properly. Instead they ask people to report when something doesn't render things properly so that it can be fixed!

Never mind the fact that alphas and betas could have debugging code which actually makes them slower.

Re:Alpha

[hkmwbz]

You'll stick to your own delusions, then. I have paid attention to Opera's development, unlike you.

Never mind the fact that alphas and betas could have debugging code which actually makes them slower.

Re:Not Even Close To Chrome In Real World Usage

[Mystra_x64]

Your facts are astound... or wait you don't have any.

IPv6

[nnet]

Did they fix IPv6 functionality?

Private browsing!

[trickyrickb]

The prayers of a thousand left handed mouses users have been answered.

Re:Private browsing!

[CannonballHead]

The prayers of the thousand left handed mouses users have been answered.

FTFY :)

Re:LOL! An Actual Opera Fanboy

[Mystra_x64]

You are even using "LOL", poor boy.

MOD PARENT -1 REDUNDANT

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a regular Chrome user. I've tried Opera 10.5 pre-alpha for the last few hours, and I find it at least as snappy on my regular rounds of javascript heavy websites. I also really like the trend in browsers toward simple UI, with no real estate wasted on menubars. The new Opera looks almost as minimalistic as Chrome. Nice. However, be warned, this early build really is wonky. Lots of small errors and things that simply don't work. Don't uninstall your main browser just yet.

I'm wondering WTF you thought "pre-alpha" means and why you felt a need to point any of this out.

Re:MOD PARENT -1 REDUNDANT

[mantis2009]

There's no need for a reviewer of pre-alpha stuff to mention stability? Really? Even when the original post provides a download link but doesn't mention any problems with stability? And the OP doesn't define pre-alpha for the noobs? OK, anonymous coward, you have a nice time flaming out there.

Re:LOL! An Actual Opera Fanboy

[causality]

Just check the clown's post history...

His/her history is quite irrelevant, but nice try at an ad-hominem there. Gp is correct; that AC did not provide any benchmarks, statistics, or other facts to back up the claim that was made about Opera performance vs. Chrome performance. Now, if GP really is a "fanboy" and you want to do something about that, how about some solid evidence for why Opera is inferior?

Note, I use neither Opera nor Chrome. I use Firefox. But this low-quality nonsense that passes for debate gets old.

Re:Not Even Close To Chrome In Real World Usage

[larry bagina]

True. Chrome is 28% faster at displaying ads.

...pre-alpha, further speed gains xpctd...

[Anonymous Coward]

The way it's going it might as well surpass in a couple months even native code... wow...

Re:So what?

[trickyrickb]

Me too, it didn't even work with BonziBUDDY. Opera dev's are totally clueless

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fast and secure... how unpleasant that must have been for you.

No Linux? :(

[Token_Internet_Girl]

[quote] There are no Linux versions yet [/quote] Those insensitive clods...

Dropping hard Qt requirement (Unix build)

[Sits]

One of the comments makes it clear that Opera will no longer have to use Qt for the *nix build. Will this just mean better platform integration or more speed though?

Cool.

[AP31R0N]

Is it FOSS?

Re:Cool.

[shutdown -p now]

No, it's free but proprietary.

Re:Cool.

[richlv]

no. but you probably knew that and were partially trolling.
would be mighty cool if it became foss one day, though.

Re:Not Even Close To Chrome In Real World Usage

[hkmwbz]

It is funny though to watch every Browser developer other than Google falling over themselves to get their own cherry picked benchmarks for their niche fanbase to cling to.

Like the V8 benchmark, you mean? LOL.

Re:LOL! An Actual Opera Fanboy

[ShatteredArm]

The funny thing is, the OP used the phrase "every Browser developer other than Google," and we're talking about whether the poster who responded is a fanboy.

Re:LOL! An Actual Opera Fanboy

[Anonymous Coward]

Just check the clown's post history...

Hah, just check your own post history. Truly abysmal.

More on the dropping of Qt

[grandmofftarkin]

http://my.opera.com/ruario/blog/unix-10-50-evenes-work-in-progress

Lacking the best feature of 10

[Anonymous Coward]

The ability to right click a link and drag down thus opening a link in a new tab. This no longer works. Where did it go?!

Pre Alpha??

[AP31R0N]

Beta is when you let outsiders test your product. Closed if you are controlling who and how many, open if you aren't.

Alpha is internal testing.

How could something that is alpha or "pre-alpha" be "out"? If it is out... it's should be called beta, or even public beta. If alpha is the first testing, how can there be anything before alpha?

This sounds like it should be called a public beta. Just because it's not on the schedule, doesn't make it less public.

Can i blame Google for causing the abuse of these terms?

Or have i been lied to about these terms ever having meaning?

Re:Pre Alpha??

[Ksevio]

Opera has sort of broken away from that traditional model since so many people like to try the latest versions. They usually release weekly builds and "pre-alphas" on their blog, betas and RCs on their beta download page (more public), and then the stable version. This one seems to have the title "pre-alpha" because it compiled, but not all the UI is complete, and a lot of things will crash it. Basically they haven't finished writing stuff and know some stuff doesn't work, so it's not even to the testing stage (which would be "alpha") or the large scale testing "beta".

Re:Pre Alpha??

[AP31R0N]

+1 Informative. Thanks. Gave you a point on the goldfish thread.

Re:Pre Alpha??

[shutdown -p now]

Beta is when you let outsiders test your product. Closed if you are controlling who and how many, open if you aren't.

Alpha is internal testing.

I've no idea where you've got those definitions from. The ones that I traditionally see being thrown around are:

Alpha - feature set not frozen, planned features may be missing, likely to have bugs; released to get feedback on new/changed features and new feature requests.

Beta - feature set frozen, likely to have bugs; released to get bug reports.

RC - feature set frozen, no known bugs except for those deemed non-release-critical and postponed for next release; if no more release-critical bugs found in a set period of time, this becomes release.

Now in practice, today, everyone is using "alpha" and "beta" essentially at random, and even "RC" can mean "beta" occasionally (heck, "release" can mean "beta" - see Vista; and it can even mean "alpha" - see KDE 4.0). But Opera guys actually use the terms in their traditional meaning: their alphas aren't feature-complete, their betas usually are, and their RCs tend to really be release candidates.

Re:Pre Alpha??

[not-my-real-name]

The nomenclature police are to underfunded to crack down on abuses like this.

As an aside, I once worked on an aerospace product that had a "Delta Flight Test". It sounded pretty interesting until I realized that they were just throwing a box on one of Delta Airline's planes.

Re:Pre Alpha??

[richlv]

that's an extremely commercial software centric viewpoint. here's one way how most opensource projects would put it.

alpha : it's just what we are working on. nothing is set in stone, major features might appear or disappear.

beta : this has a chance to be next stable release. no major features will appear or disappear, but we will fix stuff and change detail here or there.

release candidate : this will be final release. UNLESS we find critical bug, like major functionality broken or a security bug.

some projects also include so called "string freeze" - this means that user visible strings - ui text - are "frozen" and not changed, unless some emergency happens. this is usually done to give translators enough time to translate everything, and present a nice, polished translated release. string freeze tends to happen in the time period before first beta and before first rc, depending on project focus.

all this is not required or inflexible - but it should serve as an illustration why calling alphas "internal only" is not appropriate.

Re:Pre Alpha??

[XO]

do you know of any open source software that has a "nice, polished" release? (i know you were referring to the translation, but i wanted to get at that bit) I've been in the open source arena since the mid 80's, and have yet to see any.

Re:Pre Alpha??

[richlv]

sure. kernel is quite decent in some releases. latest thunderbird 2 releases are extremely stable. openoffice 1.1 series in the latest versions were _incredibly_ stable. kde3 is extremely nice. amarok 1.4 is great. i'd say apache is quite nice. you could probably find at least one opensource db that would fit such a description.
aaaand so on. so, were you serious ? :)

And they are dropping the Qt dependancy!

[grandmofftarkin]

allowing for integration with Gtk and Qt!!!

Re:And they are dropping the Qt dependancy!

[HBoar]

"We are also working on KDE integration as well but I don't have screens shots for you yet." Finally!!! I love Opera, but it does look like crap under KDE at the moment.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey... 2006 called, they want your comment back.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're on 10 now. All you've demonstrated is that you've formulated your opinion with your head up your ass.

Where's the Linux Version?

[Kartoffel]

This is Slashdot after all.

Re:You Fucking Piece Of Shit

[ShatteredArm]

Did an Opera user pick on you when you were a child or something?

FAIL

[Lawrence_Bird]

Fast? Really? Not. The acclaimed SunSpider test:

Opera 10.5 A fresh install:

Total: 4790.0ms +/- 0.2%

FIrefox 3.7a1pre20091222 (with extensions all enabled)

Total: 1928.0ms +/- 3.4%

and just for the heck of it

Opera 10.10

Total: 8887.6ms +/- 1.9%

is there some secret 'disable slow' preference in Opera I need to change?

Granted, this is on an old dual-cpu Athlon MP system so the absolute results are not comparable to anyone else but the relative results are - Opera Fails.

Re:FAIL

[yffe]

Granted, this is on an old dual-cpu Athlon MP system so the absolute results are not comparable to anyone else but the relative results are

This is because the JavaScript engine (Carakan) does not currently compile to native code for CPUs lacking SSE2. Support for older CPUs will be added in future builds.

Re:FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFA:

Some specific known issues:
High memory usage
No JIT (slow performance) on old processors without SSE2
No printing for Mac build

Re:FAIL

[XO]

Unlikely - anyone who had the knowledge to do so would be using newer hardware, and therefore would have no desire to do so.

Re:FAIL

[shutdown -p now]

That's because you're using a pointless test:

"This is SunSpider, a JavaScript benchmark. This benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, not the DOM or other browser APIs."

Which is about as useless as it gets. Your typical web page doesn't do number crunching in JS; the heaviest operation it does is going to be AJAX calls and DOM manipulation, lots of it. So JS perf is nowhere nearly as important as the speed at which browser can redraw while DOM is being updated. And on that metric, Opera is fast; only Chrome seems to be able to beat it (but lags behind in features...).

Don't bother with tests. They're useless, really - for any UI-heavy application, you don't want raw perf; you want responsibility, and that's an altogether different beast, that can be only tested by actually trying it out, and not something you can capture in numbers. It's about how smooth the pages scroll, how responsible the UI is with 20 tabs loading at the same time... these kinds of things.

Re:FAIL

[hkmwbz]

Lawrence_Bird = trolling fail. RTFA.

Re:FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

From one of the official posts on my.opera.com: "Known issues: JIT doesn't work on CPU's without SSE2 [...]"

Re:FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

More to the point, the JIT will contain ASM using SSE2 instructions, so it isn't just a matter of recompiling - parts of it would need to be rewritten.

Re:FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

Taken from http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/12/22/

Some specific known issues:

High memory usage
** No JIT (slow performance) on old processors without SSE2 **
No printing for Mac build

Re:FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

Another genius that installs pre-alpha software without actually reading the release info. From the Opera Labs post:

Some specific known issues:
-High memory usage
-No JIT (slow performance) on old processors without SSE2
-No printing for Mac build

Looks familiar?

Re:FAIL

[yffe]

It is not about just rebuilding using a different configuration, the application is still working running without JIT on non-SSE2 cpus, it is about generating x87 math instructions which is a bit trickier than using the SSE2 floating point assembler instructions.

Re:FAIL

[generaldusty]

On my Intel Centrino Windows XP Laptop, I'm getting better numbers: Total: 1028.0ms +/- 0.2%

Re:FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have used a leaked build (20192) without their new JS. Go and grap proper verison from http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/12/22/

Re:FAIL

[Lawrence_Bird]

Thanks for the info.

After seeing "Carakan is our new JavaScript engine. It’s fast, more than 7x faster in SunSpider than Opera 10.10 with Futhark on Windows (Mac optimization is not as far along)" on the opera labs page I just grabbed the download without reading further. I think best practices would be to put the disclaimer about older hardware sooner than later but thats just me.

What is interesting, however, is that firefox 3.7a spanks Opera on my non-SSE2 cpus. I'll look again when its beta to see if they have added SSE2 support and how it compares. But I do wonder if its just the firefox alpha being further along or something more fundamental.

To those whining about RTFA, theres the quote - I wasn't the one who trumpted Sunspider results, Opera did.

Re:FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

You failed.

I've just run the test on a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz (1 GB RAM) and here's the result:

Total: 907.0ms +/- 1.5%

Rendering speed

[shutdown -p now]

People seem to be focusing a lot on JS speed (often meaning specifically number crunching), but equally, if not more, important part is rendering speed, and DOM manipulation speed. And Opera has always been really, really good at that.

Now, I don't have hard numbers... but as an anecdote, consider that of all browsers that I've used, only Chrome and Opera (not just this alpha build, but 9.x and 10.x stable as well) are fast enough to not visibly lag while scrolling "Web 2.0" Slashdot discussions. Firefox, in particular, is slow, and IE is simply a non-starter.

About Opera's GUI

[thc4k]

I love two things about Opera: One is integrated www, email and rss and the other is it that it's one of the most customizable software I've ever seen. You can change *every* keyboard/mouse/mouse-gesture setting and you can customize *every* ui element (and with a good menu to do so, too).

For software i spend hours each day using, like a browser, I think the most important thing is a good user interface - and there is no better one than the one you built yourself. But it kinda makes talking about the interface pointless - spend 10 minutes with it and it will look like (your personal version of) perfection.

Re:About Opera's GUI

[shutdown -p now]

One particularly interesting thing about Opera is that it's a very good browser if you're looking for 100% keyboard controlled surfing (e.g. if you're a ratpoison/ion/wmii/... freak) - it has a lot of shortcuts to easily navigate sections and links (various combos of Ctrl/Shift/Alt and arrows), and you can easily rebind the rest keys to whatever you want - and it'll let you bind unmodified keys, too (e.g. the classic shortcut scheme uses 1 to switch to tab left of current one, and 2 to switch to tab right of current one). Then you kill all chrome except for the tabs and address bar - actually, can kill address bar as well, since Ctrl+L will bring up a dialog where you can type the address - set the theme to any of the deliberately primitive ones, and you're good to go. It's an almost perfect hardcore Unix web browser - so long as you still need your CSS, JS etc working (otherwise might as well just use links2).

Re:About Opera's GUI

[elcid73]

Amen brother- to me, the built in mouse gestures and cached history and customizable interface, the many milliseconds I've saved with those features alone are worth the random milliseconds of rendering time or scripting.

Not available for Linux?

[chrysalis]

(and for OpenBSD, etc.)

It's no biggie, just recompile it!

Oh wait...

Re:Not available for Linux?

[shutdown -p now]

You're not losing on anything, really. It really is a "pre-alpha" - I used it for about an hour today (GMail, Slashdot, Wikipedia), and it crashed over 15 times in that period for me; sometimes I'd get 2-3 crashes within a few minutes. It's pretty much useless except as a sneak peek of things to come.

Anyway, what other proprietary application do you know that provides its own apt repositories for Debian/Ubuntu, publishes binaries packed RPM and tar.gz for various architectures and dependencies' flavors (static Qt, shared Qt, different libc versions...), and also provides binaries for Solaris, FreeBSD, and many others? In that sense, I think that Opera guys are really setting a great example of how one should release proprietary software for Linux and friends.

Re:You Fucking Piece Of Shit

[haruchai]

Like Windows? I'll help build that Ark.

Re:So what?

[hkmwbz]

Aww, sad that Opera beat the crap out of your fav browser when it comes to speed?

What's the big deal?

[sevennus]

Personally, I've never understood any of this.

Not once in my 15+ years of using web browsers have I thought to myself "Man, this *browser* sure is slow." I've definitely said things like "Geez, this server sure is slow," and I've said "Golly, this flash movie is boggin' down my computer." Is the speed of the browser really making that big of a difference in actual use? I'm seeing some benchmarks in the post previews for this article, and they don't look like applicable numbers.

Simply put, answer me this question. On identical computers, on identical connections, exactly how much quicker or slower than Firefox would Opera be in returning a Google image search for "Cosplay Cammy Big Butt"?

Re:What's the big deal?

[Petrushka]

Not once in my 15+ years of using web browsers have I thought to myself "Man, this *browser* sure is slow."

I've had mostly the same experience, but we've probably made sure to be using decent hardware all that time as well. A year or two ago, on a low-end netbook, I found trying to open a Slashdot discussion with the new interface in Firefox 2 to be agonising. One of the reasons I switched to Ubuntu Netbook Edition was specifically so as to get Firefox 3.

In fact maybe that's the way to illustrate how important JS speed is: try opening a Slashdot or Digg discussion page in Firefox 1 or 2 ... and have a fire extinguisher nearby for when your CPU starts to melt.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Vectronic]

I can't actually time this, but there is a noticeable difference, granted I only did a single test in each browser... if I had to make up numbers...

Opera 10.5: 0.7 seconds
Opera 10.10: 1.0 seconds
Chromium 4.0: 1.2 seconds
IExplorer8: 1.5 seconds
Safari 4.0: 1.6 seconds
Firefox 3.6 B5: 1.7 seconds

Though, Safari actually "looks" slower than Firefox because Firefox starts rendering sooner, whereas Safari waits for the full page then displays. For what it's worth, DL 5Mb/UL 1Mb connection... less than a second difference between them all, but for a lot of people that adds up, it's like a little nagging voice that eventually turns into frustration, especially when a website isn't what you were hoping for.

The actual speed with which the browser GETs and renders a website is probably close to the last reason why Opera is my preferred browser, however, it is the main reason why Chromium is my secondary browser in tandem with the fact that it also starts about as quick as Opera, so I can quickly test something outside of Opera without having to go make coffee while it does so.

Re:What's the big deal?

[owlstead]

And - I'm sorry to say - scrolling isn't smooth, even on my recent computer. Hardware accelerated scrolling certainly makes sense. Maybe more buffering could do the same thing, but FF3.5 is not as smooth as it should be. The android phone I tried today easily beat it.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Vectronic]

Actually, according to DragonFly, over an average of 5 searches each:

10.5: 538ms
10.1: 625ms

Guess my internal clock is a bit slow, and that's just the GETs, doesn't measure rendering speed.

Re:What's the big deal?

[jp10558]

Well, I've used older versions of Opera, say 9.5, on New Slashdot. It's painful. Or try 9.x on some web app interfaces (Like Zenoss Core 2.2 or so) and see how painful it is. Firefox was faster there. I've also seen slowness on other apps, like the js implementation of a NES ROM emulator. So yes, there are things that could certainly be faster.

Re:What's the big deal?

[sopssa]

There are things you can't really measure with technical tests, it's just the feel of it. UI responses instantly and feels fast, unlike FF or IE. Also other thing to consider is how fast the browser can start drawing the page, even while its loading. In Opera you can set this to happen instantly as the data starts coming in. It really brings down the "Geez, this server sure is slow," effect, especially if you're loading large and complicated pages like slashdot.

But like said, these are things you just feel. Nevertheless it makes a huge difference.

CSS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any support for border-radius, box-shadow, text-shadow?

Re:CSS?

[Mystra_x64]

Yes. text-shadow is already supported in 10 AFAIR.

By "fast", let's hope they don't mean...

[rnturn]

... that the Error Console window now pops up before the main browser window begins rendering. It's almost that fast now in Opera 10.10. Now I rarely even begin reading a web page because that window is bound to pop up in the middle of my reading the first paragraph of text. It used to be annoying as all get out until I realized if I merely minimize it, instead of closing it, I only have to look at it once per browser session. Making it possible to control how sensitive Opera is to minor errors should be possible so users can avoid having to deal with the annoying error console. Either that or allow us to choose to route all the error console messages to a log file and not even open the darned console window. IMHO, that would be a more welcome feature than having a built-in web server.

Re:By "fast", let's hope they don't mean...

[jp10558]

In 10.10, you can turn off the error console completely. I never have it pop up. Try going to Tools -> Preferences, Advanced tab, Content Leaf, Javascript options button, and uncheck show error console on error.

Re:By "fast", let's hope they don't mean...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you have it enabled if it bothers you to have it popping up all the time?

Why on earth would anyone enable their error console anyway? That would annoy me in any browser.

It's fast is it?

[Slutticus]

So basically... pages are incorrectly rendered at an even faster rate, causing me to open Safari quicker for those pesky webpages that I shouldn't be using anyway? I can't wait! *this is from a frustrated Opera user...*

Re:It's fast is it?

[shutdown -p now]

Where do you even find those mysterious web sites that don't render correctly in Opera, but work in Safari of all things?

In my experience, there are, broadly speaking, 3 kinds of websites:

- those that only work in IE (a dwindling minority, legacy of early 2000s)

- those that only work in IE and Firefox (coded by lemmings who don't understand "standards" and "cross-browser markup", write ad-hoc HTML, and test it in the only two browsers they know)

- those that work in any standard-compliant browser, including Opera (if you've seen its compliance scores, you know they're one of the best, and simply the best in some areas)

Re:It's fast is it?

[hkmwbz]

In my experience Safari's compatibility with sites i pretty pathetic compared to Opera. Opera was designed from the ground up to be compatible. Safari will happily sacrifice compatibility for speed (even though they are only the 3rd fastest browser now, behind Opera and Chrome).

Re:It's fast is it?

[Slutticus]

Okay okay, sorry for the snark. But I guess point number three is what I have a problem with. I've been an opera user since 2001 and as anyone who has used opera for this long will tell you, it's been a painful process holding on to a browser you know is better....but for some reason always gets passed up. Why is that? Over the years I convinced many people to try Opera....they were happy for a bit....but most users simply didn't have the time to try to make something work. And they certainly weren't going to accept "coded by lemmings" excuses. They just wanted something that worked. So they uninstalled. If you want to know current issues, just visit the opera forums. Things are much better now, but you can't erase the past. Then....Firefox comes out of nowhere and becomes the "other browser". How did firefox get 25% of the browser market in 5 years when Opera had a 5 year head start? I don't know for sure, but I suspect they don't make excuses about "standards" and just make sure it works. I can't tell you how disappointing it is when people rave about the mouse gestures firefox plug-in and how great it is. *sigh*

Re:It's fast is it?

[shutdown -p now]

I've been using Opera since 5.0 (that's 2000).

How did firefox get 25% of the browser market in 5 years when Opera had a 5 year head start?

Opera was adware for a long time, enough for Firefox to gain popularity.

As well, in terms of standards, Opera 5/6/7 and to some extent 8 were behind the corresponding up-to-date Firefox versions.

Get faster?

[Stan92057]

Sense its a Pre alpha, shouldn't it get slower as they add more features,not faster?

Re:Get faster?

[hkmwbz]

Opera has always gotten faster despite getting more features. Also, shouldn't the final version be faster since they remove all the debug stuff?

Closed source doesn't always suck

[noz]

Closed source software stinks. Microsot Windows crawls. Anything good by Microsoft is purchased from a former developer. Adobe is not only slow to fix security holes; it continues to distribute software it knows has holes that are actively being exploited. At work I'm exposed to corporate shit by IBM that is used in every incorrect way possible (arguably IBM is a contributor to this problem). Closed source makes me want to vomit. No privacy. No security.

But then there's Opera: possibly the only closed source project that genuinely competes on quality: accurate, good interface, efficient, and even good security? Who knows.

But then I don't use anything closed source anymore, so perhaps I'm missing some other well deserved programs.

Re:Closed source doesn't always suck

[heffrey]

Windows and Office are both excellent. Also MSE. There's Dreamweaver too. Also Delphi. Don't forget .net which is pretty amazing. Visual Studio. What about Skype. Lots of excellent software is closed source. I personally don't really care how the software is made. I think it's much more important to judge the end product rather than the process by which it was made. The latter attitude strikes me as being similar to holding religious beliefs.

Re:Closed source doesn't always suck

[selven]

Windows and Office are both excellent. Don't forget .net which is pretty amazing. Visual Studio.

I never liked any of these four. Office has proprietary formats that aren't consistent in the way different office suites and even different versions of office handle them. Windows - well, once I learned about virtual desktops, the unix terminal and repositories, I'm never looking back. VS may be good but it's not my style of programming. As for .net, I find the programming side of it quite unwieldy. It was much harder to learn than most other programming environments (except the minimum 200 lines of code you need to run a simple graphical application in DirectX). Once again, could simply be my personal ideas on programming interfering with those last two.

And before I get accused of prejudice, most of this was back when I thought GNU and Linux were some hacker things in the 1980s.

Re:Closed source doesn't always suck

[imakemusic]

+5 Insightful?

Adobe is not only slow to fix security holes; it continues to distribute software it knows has holes that are actively being exploited.

True, Flash has issues, but then Adobe also make Photoshop (yeah, GIMP is usable but nowhere near as good), Dreamweaver (actually they bought that one, but it's still closed source), After Effects and a host of other top-notch industry standard software.

But then I don't use anything closed source anymore, so perhaps I'm missing some other well deserved programs.

So what you're saying is you're talking about something that you don't know about? When was the last time you did use some of this software that you so hate?

Re:LOL! An Actual Opera Fanboy

[interkin3tic]

Anti-fanboy fanboys are the worst fanboys of them all. It's like they can't orgasm until they've called someone "fanboy." And it's not even a good insult. Fan, okay, boy, sure... fan+boy= something that's bad? I'm a fan of things and male, yes... You didn't even throw in anything vulgar.

Opera-fucker, now THAT is an insult.

Fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera 3.x versions were fast. It's turned into a bloated monster since. Just because it's running a little faster than all the other bloated monsters doesnt mean it's fast.

Re:Not Even Close To Chrome In Real World Usage

[Anonymous Coward]

It is funny though to watch every Browser developer other than Google falling over themselves to get their own cherry picked benchmarks for their niche fanbase to cling to.

It is funny to see someone make such a comment in a thread about Opera - the only browser developer NOT relying on their own cherry picked benchmarks - all the statistics sofar are in the V8 (Google's), Dromaeo (Moz) and Sunspider (Apple) ones. Not an Opera made test in sight... yet anyway.

Re:You Fucking Piece Of Shit

[Anonymous Coward]

I lol'd, will read again! A++++++++

Opera developement, or going the wrong way?

[Ekuryua]

It has always bugged me that opera devs. always focus on benchmark numbers when their browser is already acclaimed for being more than fast enough. What about ACTUAL features that users have been begging for, for 5 or 6 versions. Like a decent extension framework.(this is probably something they must have some sort of magical curse to not do, since they're ignoring people since the beginning) Like a lot more control over ui customization.(try getting the menu next to your buttons so as not to waste a full row, and no, fake menus made of buttons do not behave like menus)
Like type as you find?(or did they finally add that one?)

Features wise, opera only seems to like adding stuff pertinent to a select few, and ignore the rest of the world.

It's just a browser that needs to get out of the dark age of control-is-security.

Re:Opera developement, or going the wrong way?

[shutdown -p now]

Like type as you find?(or did they finally add that one?)

I'm not sure if that's what you mean, but if you press / in Opera and start typing, it will highlight all occurrences of the currently typed input in the text, and focus on the first one of them, dynamically scrolling/re-highlighting as you keep typing. This feature had been there at least since Opera 7, maybe earlier.

Re:Opera developement, or going the wrong way?

[hkmwbz]

What about ACTUAL features that users have been begging for, for 5 or 6 versions.

So because you want something, they must add it or their focus is wrong? Also, if you had paid attention, you would have noticed that there's a lot of new stuff there apart from the speed.

Like a lot more control over ui customization.(try getting the menu next to your buttons so as not to waste a full row, and no, fake menus made of buttons do not behave like menus)

This is crazy. "I want more control, but I will specifically exclude the nearly limitless UI customization options that are there already." If you specifically exclude things it can do that you want, you can make any claim.

Like type as you find?

What, you mean Opera's inline find, which they added ages before Firefox was even being considered?

Features wise, opera only seems to like adding stuff pertinent to a select few, and ignore the rest of the world.

Yeah, because if they don't add exactly what you personally want, it's "just for a selected few"...

It's just a browser that needs to get out of the dark age of control-is-security.

I actually think it's just you who needs to get his head out of his ass. But that's just me.

Re:Opera developement, or going the wrong way?

[Ekuryua]

You might want to open eyes and see I'm faaaaaaaar from being the only person that finds opera very lacking on the extensibility. Unless of course you have eyeblinds put on.

Re:Opera developement, or going the wrong way?

[Ekuryua]

That's nice to hear. I would expect find instances to be unified but that works fine too.

Re:Opera developement, or going the wrong way?

[hkmwbz]

I never claimed that no one else wanted extensions. I pointed out that just because you want something doesn't mean that it is something Opera absolutely must do, even if some other people want it as well.

Re:Opera developement, or going the wrong way?

[Ekuryua]

Which is exactly why extensions are a good thing. They unload a large burden from application developers to leave petty/specific stuff to other people.

Re:Opera developement, or going the wrong way?

[Zoidbot]

No, I think it's pretty much you...

Opera has pretty much all the useful stuff already built in, without the security/relibility isues and bloat that Firefox style extensions bring with them.

multiple backgrounds!

[MikeFM]

Looks like they finally have multiple backgrounds working. Will have to test if it's fixed the other places it was lacking but is a good sign. Have been looking for it since 10.

Not better for end users

[Errol backfiring]

I don't think end users will get any better. Existing hacks will not go away, and HTML5 only defines new, "exiting" ways to spy on users, standardise personal private data and store even more tracking on the user's device.

I haven't seen a browser yet that allows the persistent storage to be switched off, and I haven't seen any browser yet that admits that it is a privacy problem. The only difference between persistent HTML5 storage and flash cookies is that flash cookies are acknowledged as a privacy threat.

Opera is worthy along with Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont use Opera, but I have tried the latest version 10 and I must say they improved the UI (which I didnt like before). Its fast and perfroms well. Its the great browser that gets no respect. Honestly the slothiest browser these days is Firefox and I like firefox, but its slow.

LLVM

[badkarmadayaccount]

Anybody hoping Mozilla port Tracemonkey's IR generator to LLVM IR, and short circuit tracing to compile the whole thing, V8 style, so we can all see what real speed means?