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

[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

[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

[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.

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 :)

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: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?

[mister_playboy]

Fanboy's list works great.

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.