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Opera 10.50 Beta Out, With Competitive JavaScript
Opera has released its 10.5 beta (for Windows only; Linux and Mac coming). Opera calls 10.5 "the fastest browser on earth," but the jury is out on this claim. WebMonkey says that the new beta feels snappy in their informal testing. Both CNET and ZDNet ran two quick benchmarks that measure JavaScript performance, SunSpider and V8. ZDNet found Opera beating out Chrome in SunSpider but lagging in V8. CNET found Chrome ahead in both tests. What is clear however is that Opera's Carakan JavaScript engine has made up much of the ground in the performance wars; The Reg estimates that 10.5 is seven times faster in the JavaScript stakes than Opera's shipping 10.1 release.
Can we finally just ditch JavaScript for something better? Python, Ruby, or some dialect of Scheme would be much better. Hell, even Perl and Tcl would be a huge step in the right direction.
JavaScript started out as a quick hack over 15 years ago, and has unfortunately stuck around far longer than it should have. We can do better, and we should do better.
Opera, Google, Apple, Mozilla and the KDE project should team up on this goal, and make it happen. If Microsoft doesn't want to get with the times, then leave them behind.
I'm actually far more excited for VEGA (their new vector graphics lib) than the javascript update. Is having spiffy-fast js nice? Yea, but I think Vega is really where they're going to shine. It'll make transformations and other animations run far smoother in opera than any other browser (with the exception of firefox's direct2d experimental build that was released a while back). Kudos Opera, you're ahead of the game yet again.
There is already a standard language for writing web pages and it's called HTML. JS was useful for getting some effects like rollover buttons that we can now do with CSS. AJAX turned web pages into client-server apps that also had occasional usefulness but was more often was just used to create cuteseyness. These days though, the amount of JS being imported into almost every page is staggering, and it's typically for evil and invasive purposes. If you use Adblock Plus or Firebug, take a look at the JS code browser tracking stuff from quantserve, google-analytics, and others, that show up all over the web. It's evil enough that those companies do cross-site tracking of your browsing at all, but the scripts they send reveal way more info about your browser than the mere HTTP hit to the tracking site would reveal. (You should of course configure your browser to not send referer headers). Even the fancy but legitimately useful UI toolkits (e.g. YUI, jQuery) are invasive because they are so often served from third party sites (Yahoo or Google) instead of directly from the app site.
Yes all this stuff can also happen through other means. But, JS is the mechanism making it spread so much. We can't get rid of JS completely but we were better off in the old days when it was cumbersome and slow.
Opera, my favorite browser for years just, lost some major credit from me. I find 10.5 to be an exciting release, especially Carakan, but I always admired them for delivering a quality browser simultaneously for most platforms and this time they failed at that. According to a developer's blog post, 10.5 final will also come out for Windows before it comes out for other platforms, and then they are going to shift focus to them.
At least he says that it's only for 10.5.
It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
In Opera go to:
>View >Small Screen
This decreases the horizontal width of pages greatly, making moderate to longer texts alot easier to read. If the horizontal length of a page is too great when you are the end of a line it takes longer to re-orient your eyes to reach the next line, re-adjust your mental focus to the new line and continue on. The small screen feature actually makes reading texts on a web browser more pleasurable and easy.
One must ask again, with Opera and Chrome speeds is Firefox even relevant?
Que the "if adblock was a woman I'd finally get laid!" crowd.
The two articles use different versions of Chrome. Both version 5 developer build and release build 4 of Chrome are used, thus the discrepancy. Pretty obvious really
As an everyday Chrome user I have to say this new Opera beta is pretty spiffy. I've been using it for the past day and while the UI is certainly Chrome-like but seems to have a bit more polish. The best part is it seems on par if not even slightly faster with most rendering in comparison to Chrome. Lately I've switched from Safari/FF to Chrome, but I'll be seeing how Opera works this one out. This will be great to see on Mac and Linux at some point in the future. Especially Mac where Opera performance has generally lagged.
I tried it, and found it still has some irritating issues. For one thing, proxy settings don't work right, which is a real pain in the butt for those of us in a university. I know it's beta software, but that's still a pretty nasty issue, and has been commented on on their forums already.
Otherwise, it seems to be quite nice. I like the new UI, newsgroups and mail features, but I haven't been using it near enough to get beyond that.
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
Note: I do recognize and appreciate the need to make javascript perform better.
Thing is...it seems that for many tech "journalists" hardly anything besides js matters anymore!
Notice how Opera said "the fastets on earth"; which might be still debatable of course, but they did not say "...fastest in javascript". Opera knows that's not the whole story in browser performance. You can see it especially when using Opera on some ancient machine where the difference is most startling. WebMonkey seems to know it too (nah, not reading TFA...)
CNET, ZDNet and The Reg seem to care only about JS...
What is it? Some new widespread fascination with numbers like in 3DMark heyday? "Journalists" taking the easy route by simply running automatic benchmarks? (written "for" Opera competitors BTW...)
One that hath name thou can not otter
I've wanted to like Opera for years, but I don't like the way it caches data...for example using the Yuku (old EZ Board) message board. If there are new articles, I have to manually hit refresh to detect them when I navigate back to the page later on. IE, Firefox, and Chrome automatically detect the changes, Opera does not. Maybe there is a setting I could change, but why should I when the other browsers work fine out of the box for this.
I tried several of the Chrome Experiments on Opera 10.5, and everything ran very smoothly. Good going Opera.
Now if only they'd add an option to make the keyboard/mouse options more like Firefox/Chrome, I could use this as my default browser. It still bugs me that it's very, very hard to make a customizable browser like Opera open new tabs with a ctrl-click like every other browser.
Go somewhere random
In case you didn't know, Opera wants to have a new version ready before the Windows browser ballot screen for the EU is in effect.
Signature has left the building.
Go to http://www.opera.com/browser/download/?os=windows&ver=10.50b1&local=y
to download as navigating from the info page on the features in 10.50 Beta returned an error
Looking forward to seeing how this performs as i've been using Opera for 10 years but FF have been my go-to browser
for the last 3.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
If your trying the beta out, try the Z1-Glass theme, its pretty spiffy. I think it looks better than the default skin. You can download it by pressing Shift + F12, Select "Find More Skins" radio, then sort by Top Rated tab.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
shut up, tranny
In Opera you press:
Ctrl+t
to open a new tab, I do not see the big deal and why Ctrl+click is better in any way. I am sure you can edit this in the ini anyway to make +click.
The new Chrome-like minimal UI, the javascript. VERY slick. Loving this new version. Keep up the great work Opera :)
Ctrl-click allows you to open a number of pages in the background, quickly. Give it a try in Chrome/Firefox/IE8/Safari, on a link-rich page like news.google.com. Opera is alone in making it shift-ctrl-click. And no, this isn't something you can edit the .ini for -- at least, I've not been able to find a way so far. I'd be very grateful if you could point out a solution.
Go somewhere random
It's a document format.
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
Love the new UI, and really appreciate the option of another well done browser. But they still refuse to fix a trivial CSS bug which has horrible consequences for AJAX apps.
Just go to this page, and resize your browser with the vertical (not horizontal) handle.
http://echo.nextapp.com/content/test/operacss/
(This is very hard/impossible to do on a mac, as they don't really have one).
Unfortunately the bug is not limited to resizing with the vertical handle...it manifests itself in other ways. It seems the browser is incorrectly measuring/reporting the vertical size of elements, and sometimes uses this data internally (as in the case of this test).
Full thread is here:
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=250572
And one of the Ajax apps that experiences more serious failures as a result: http://demo.nextapp.com/
It's is also noteworthy that John Hicks of http://hicksdesign.co.uk/ the guy that created the Firefox logo is now lead UI designer in Opera
A Whiney little language fanboy bitch who can't form a thought or read the fucking manual. Javascript is simple and works well. Now let's just ditch your lazy ass shit.
SunSpider is a "core JS benchmark". It does not focus on interaction with the renderer (which is what JS is used for in >95% of web pages), it basically tests JS performance as a computing platform. While this is likely to become more relevant in the future, it's still not a good measure of how a browser's JS performance impacts user experience.
Opera 9 was quite slow at running SunSpider and yet reacted faster than any browser of its time to user interaction in most pages, simply because it was faster "where it mattered" (interaction with the DOM and renderer).
If I was a cynical person, I'd say that SunSpider (a benchmark created by WebKit) was designed specifically to make WebKit look better than Opera and Firefox... :-P
The only feature I want is being able to run Gmail, iGoogle without bugs, and being able to log in Youtube and any google service. I've been using Opera for a while but it's really annoying to have to switch browser just to be able to read the news and emails.
Finally!!! This has been pissing me off for a long time. I almost switched browsers over this it was so annoying.
I can finally access FreeBSD.org and other such sites again...
middle button of your mouse. try it.
or try mouse gestures.
Python, Ruby, or some dialect of Scheme
"The key design principles within JavaScript are inherited from the Self and Scheme programming languages."
Javascript is almost already a dialect of Scheme. Are you sure you know Javascript as well as you think you do? What would you want from a Scheme Variant you do not have today?
I can't find the reference, but on a StackOverflow podcast it was stated by one of the initial designers that the syntax initially even was very much like Scheme, but at the last moment they wanted to have it use a Java style syntax instead..
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm not seeing that behavior at all in Opera 10.1 under Windows 7.
Funny... no problems for me.
If the css implementation is shite, it is still shite. Can't make up for the visual suckiness with faster js.
Yeah, that one's been around a while. Only real way to mitigate it is JS (jquery has a nice $(window).resize() function - though it doesn't seem to work in some version of Safari).
Oh, it's you. You keep spamming Slashdot with the same trivial and irrelevant issue over and over again. Why?
Clever signature text goes here.
for the record, 10.10 resizes the area when decreasing it vertically, but not when increasing.
Rich
"Flush out your headgear, new guy. The days of HTML- and CSS- only websites are over." - by amicusNYCL (1538833) on Friday February 12, @06:42PM (#31121810)
This article speaks of trade-offs, & there's one YOU are overlooking "old guy": What is the % of infestations foisted on people online by javascript in their webbrowsers, HTML scriptable emails, & Adobe .pdf malscripted documents?
90-95% nowadays approximately (if not more)??
(Take yourself a trip over to SECURITYFOCUS.COM &/or SECUNIA.COM... you'll see EXACTLY what I mean if you do!)
APK
P.S.=> Still - I don't think folks should outright "turn off javascript" though... However, I do think they ought to use javascript SPARINGLY (i.e./e.g.-> Only on sites they absolutely trust (is there such a thing?) OR on sites they cannot conduct business (or whatever it is they're up to there on said site) on without the use of javascript)... that's all!
In the end here, all I have to say, is this:
"Hats off to the folks @ Opera"
They never cease to amaze, & rarely let me down (don't know about the rest of you)! apk
thanks
i like it
http://www.pallap.com/