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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'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.
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
That is silly, any language, whether it is action script or perl or c or whatever, that is embedded into a web page will have to be translated by the browser somehow or maybe compiled even into something resembling bytecode or maybe even native instruction set (unlikely, given the security problems around that.)
So who cares what language it is? Javascript is fine. I would not mind having other options but even then, you can always write in something else and then run through a translator from your language of choice into javascript.
Maybe what really SHOULD be done is that regardless of what the source code is, the HTML page would instead require some sort of base 64 encrypted byte code.
Now THAT would speed things up. But then you cross into the Java on the client realm I think. If the implementation was better, faster, then who really would mind?
You can't handle the truth.
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
Stop the trains, I wanna go back to horse and carriage!
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.
for the record, IE also supports VBScript and PerlScript. Maybe you should spend more time with IE.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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
Are you an alt for BadAnalogyGuy? Trains actually do something useful you can't do as well with horses. Javascript does nothing you can't do better with either plain HTML, or a native app. If you want to display a document, HTML is great and javascript adds nothing useful. If you want to write an app, there are any number of portable languages and toolkits that will perform much better than javascript.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
VBScript is nothing to tout as a positive. Certainly not as a potential replacement for Javascript.
Maybe you should spend more time with IE.
Please don't say that.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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...
Another similar feature is "Fit to Width" (on Status Bar lately, I think...unless I chnaged something; also in View menu)
Makes what it says, and typically manages to do it without breaking the layout. Usefull on, say, netbooks.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Flush out your headgear, new guy. The days of HTML- and CSS- only websites are over. Even though those sites still exist, there's an entirely new category of "websites" online: web applications. The application I've been working on for the last 3 years or so is composed of about 60% Javascript, 30% PHP, 8% CSS, 1% HTML, 1% "other". With the recent push in Javascript engines, I've actually been able to watch the performance of the application improve by a substantial amount through no effort of my own, just because the application uses Javascript for the entire interface and browsers have focused on that aspect.
Nearly all of Google's services other than search are powered by Javascript, from Maps to Mail. Javascript (or any widely-supported client-side scripting language) is here to stay, and frankly it's the future of anything that's going to be online other than your basic informational sites. Even sites which are taking advantage of all of the new features in HTML5 will continue to take advantage of Javascript as well. The difference between IE6/7 and any very recent (< 3 months) browser is staggering.
I'm glad to see Opera catching up again, they're my browser of choice. They were among the fastest of the "first generation" JS engines, but nearly everyone else other than Microsoft pretty much beat Opera to the punch in the next generation of Javascript. It's nice to see them catch up. I hope Microsoft is able to make better strides with IE9, if not before.
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.
You can't say that the libraries are invasive because they're included from third-party applications, the application developers are invasive. My chosen framework (ExtJS in this case) is served from the same domain as the rest of the application, all gzipped and everything.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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
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/
JavaScript is a de facto standard supported by all browsers. Unseating it would be as hard as migrating from GIF to PNG. And, unlike GIF, it doesn't have any patent problems, and in general it's just "good enough". Furthermore, there's no clear single replacement - quite a lot of people are actually very happy with JS, but even of those who are not, some would promote Python, some Ruby, etc.
Don't fix what's not broken badly enough.
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
you are an idiot. I said base 64 so that binary bytecode could be transfered as part of an ascii page if necessary, that is all.
You can't handle the truth.
Perhaps you should give some inherit advantages that Python, Ruby or Scheme have over JavaScript? Since the newer JS engines are probably much faster than any Python or Ruby engine currently. The language itself (as of ES3) is pretty feature competitive, it's simply that most developers don't understand the language. And confuse the language itself with the API that the browser exposes. A crappy API will be crappy regardless of the language used to interface with that API, if not translated. PHP for example isn't a bad language (IMHO) but most of the exposed APIs are horrible in terms of use within the language in question.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
I actually like JavaScript/JScript a lot. Back in the mid-late 90's I did a lot of my server-side code in JS (LiveWire/LiveScript or ASP). The only hard part was dealing with COM objects in JScript was kinda dirty (having to use the enumerator all the time). I honestly don't have a problem with the language. I think the biggest issues at hand are most developers don't know/understand javascript, or confuse the browser's DOM APIs (rendering quirks) and inconsistencies with language itself. Tooling is another issue, but there's been some improvements here as well.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
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.
By reading this signature, you hereby agree with the content of the above comment.
Well, browser based apps can be updated on a limited set of servers, without the need to update clients you don't control. Compiled apps need to be distributed, updated, etc. Automatic updating is troublesome and doesn't fit into the way many OSes are configured where administrative access is needed to install software. They allow for applications to be updated rapidly, and seamlessly.
Without JS HTML alone would not be enough. HTML allows for limited communications to/from a server refreshing a portion of the screen without refreshing the entire screen. This can be done via iFrames, but that isn't a better option. I will admit that in many instances JS is badly implemented, and loading a heavy UI toolkit for some simple events and/or styling doesn't make sense. That is a separate issue from the usefulness or not of the language.
Not to mention, it's actually a decent language in and of itself. node.js CommonJS and other movements are showing a lot of growth as a server-side platform. With all the emphasis on improving the runtime engines, it's probably the most efficient scripted language around today (in general purpose use).
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
You say that like language diversity is a bad thing. HTML's SCRIPT tag has supported multiple languages for some time. The only problem being that the only alternative to JavaScript was something only IE supported.
Assuming some, if not all, of these new-fangled JS virtual machines, operated via an intermediate 'bytecode', support for multiple dynamic languages shouldn't be too hard if enthusiasts of Ruby, Python & others do the legwork.
Target the open source ones and too bad if your clients use Internet Explorer. It's a new decade; browser wars are so 1990s.
You say that like language diversity is a bad thing.
It is a bad thing when portability matters. In this case, language is part of the larger standard (HTML), so, yes, it is definitely bad. If I have to guess whether the end browser supports language X out of 20 various scripting languages in active use, or if browser writers have to support all 20, it's an epic fail of any standardization effort.
Assuming some, if not all, of these new-fangled JS virtual machines, operated via an intermediate 'bytecode', support for multiple dynamic languages shouldn't be too hard if enthusiasts of Ruby, Python & others do the legwork.
It's rather tricky to come up with a reasonably high-level bytecode that can be shared between all scripting languages. Their semantics are rather different.
On the other hand, you can say that JS is such a bytecode - after all, we already have Java compiler to JS (GWT), and I've seen prototypes of other similar things, too.
I tend to agree. Javascript (and Actionscript) is a pretty pleasant language to work with. It's the terrible integration into browsers that is the problem.
If history had proceeded differently, and Netscape had incorporated Python instead of jscript, everybody would be whining about how terrible Python is.
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
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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
Great job on opera. Its still the best. Only downside is that you don't release all beta versions at the same time. Its a pain when the linux version is the poor relation in release schedules.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
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).
The only thing about JavaScript that is a quick hack is its name. JavaScript is the world's most misunderstood programming language (funny how this link finds its way into every Slashdot story that mentions JavaScript) as well as the first (only?) functional language accepted by maistream.
You might argue that most of the JavaScript code on the Internet is a quick hack (or at least was, before frameworks like Prototype and jQuery became popular), but that doesn't make it a bad language.
Judging by your hate for JS I would have to assume you're an IE6 user.
I've been using Gmail since it came out. Except for a few short periods in history, Opera has worked pretty well. For the last...I don't know how many years, it's worked without me noticing a single issue.
What exactly are you missing when trying to use Gmail in Opera? It certainly isn't just reading your mail.
It is a bad thing when portability matters.
Or maintainability. Microsoft were proud when .Net was new-ish that 50+ languages apparently targeted the CLR/CLI, so that a Haskell component can use an Eiffel library.
But what do you do the day your only Haskell programmer decides to leave? And the app he wrote needs to be maintained?
No wonder Microsoft in reality pushes C# despite this abundance of languages.
What's wrong with the CSS implementation?
Clever signature text goes here.
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