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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'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.
It was originally targeted towards rendering svg files only. They needed something they could use to render them on their mobile releases, but they didn't find anything that cross-platform so they rolled their own. Eventually they added canvas support to it, and ultimately made it their primary rendering engine for all html elements in this release.
Web applications. For pages with no to little javascript (and without the flash hog) the speed is just fine in all browsers unless you got an obsession about saving 30 seconds over a day of surfing. But if you are working in web applications for extended periods of time, the speed really matters. Now none of the big corporations has enough guts to publicly stab IE in the back, but IT departments aren't all clueless and web applications are becoming commonplace now that the hype has moved on and "the cloud" is the next big thing.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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/