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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.
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.
They quite clearly explained that this was because the Linux and Mac versions were undergoing much bigger changes than the Windows version. And they will be faster and better integrated as a result. How is that a "fail"?
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Possibly. Even under their older javascript library, the graphical draw was the bottleneck, not the JS. Think of it like upgrading a computer - sure the new processor is nice, but switching the cassette tape for a new ssd is going to be slightly more noticeable.
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.
What's wrong with the middle mouse button?
Opera used Shift for that purpose before other browsers even had tabs, and it still works that way (I think - I really don't know, because I've had a mouse with a scroll wheel for many years now).
Preferences, Advanced, Shortcuts?
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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...
I've been using Opera for some time now but I've become very attached to many of their other shortcut keys.
Most indispensable is going forward/back by holding left click and right clicking and vice versa. It's just so intuitive. I catch myself trying to use it constantly in file explorer.
That's what I want. Customizable Windows shortcut keys. Why not?
Laptops don't have a middle mouse button...
Most laptops don't have a middle mouse button.
One that hath name thou can not otter
roman_mir, It would have been clearer if you referred to it as base 64 *encoding*, rathern than encryption, since it has nothing to do with cryptography.
On an unrealted note, with regards to the V8 performance test, the reason Chrome's V8 engine works well with the V8 benchmark is because the tests themselves are bias towards the specific optimisations that the Chrome developers have chosen to include in their V8 engine.
Carakan, on the the other hand, has, for various reasons, been developed to optimise for different cases. There are trade-offs here which, as a result, affect the performance of Carakan in some of the tests included in the V8 performance test.
Disclaimer: I work for Opera the on Carakan team. I cannot go into specifics about what optimisations and trade-offs have been made.
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Prefs > Advanced > History. I think by default it sets to 5 hours for Documents and Images, which is obviously far too long. I've been carrying over a set of preferences since sometime around version 9, so I have no clue what the default is these days. But setting Documents to "every time" and Images to whatever pleases you (mine's at 5 minutes, which I think might be a little much) should solve the issue.
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.
Greedy caching is always better. No exceptions. Reconnecting over the web is a waste when your were just here 5 minutes ago, or worse, if you misclicked a link and have to wait for it to reload over a dialup or bad Wifi connection. When you block flash and ads at a proxy or hardware level, and even turn JS off, it is stupid to have a page reload again when you click back.
It is silly to forget that 10 years ago pages were not expected to have new blog posts, breaking news or twit / myspace / facebook garbage considered an update to be urgently pushed to the browser; hell, we still don't get minute by minute data unless flash, java or JS addins are riding on to of the webpage, making refresh buttons not necessary for important data (realtime quotes, for instance, use ActiveX; businesses don't trust your HTML layer for refreshing.)
We have been coerced by MS to forget that we can use a refresh botton if we are on ... the front page of slashdot. Hell, HTML and cookies both have TTL functionality, so more webmasters should play a larger part if you are really that bothered about Opera not "being told" which pages to never cache.
It really pisses me off when I'm on a legacy but maxed out PC with a mainstream browser and every single Back click destroys the whole point of having a browser history. Most browsers don't even let you define when to refresh content, and use a messed up model of refresh everything instead of refresh only webpages whose tags suggest to do so.
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