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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.
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
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"?
Clever signature text goes here.
Yeah, Opera can't win that one. Opera has been around longer than FF and Chrome combined, so when you start changing "Shortcuts" to be more like FF/Chrome the people that have used Opera forever complain.
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?
Clever signature text goes here.
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...
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
Netscape/Mozilla is older than IE, but Firefox still changed over to IE-ish shortcuts on Windows in order to be a more comfortable transition.
Also, I'm not asking Opera to shaft their loyal users. Opera is very customizable. There's no reason why they couldn't create a Firefox-ish shorcut set and let users choose that as an option. In fact, right now my biggest gripe is that their customization doesn't allow you to redefine ctrl-click consistently.
Go somewhere random
Would require some big organizational changes though; usually the ideas, solutions flow in the other direction ;)
One that hath name thou can not otter
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?
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/
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
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.
On top of those major changes, they are pushing Windows at the moment because of the EU Vs. Microsoft thing, where in March Microsoft will have to add the "Choose Your Browser" dialog, and Opera wants 10.5 to be on that list, not 10.1.
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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Every Tom, Dick, and Harry browser that comes along? IE8/Firefox/Chrome/Safari, which are #1-4 in the marketplace, have very similar keyboard shortcuts. You'd think Opera would at least study its competition. Alternatively it could continue enjoying its niche as #5.
Go somewhere random
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