Opera 10.5 Alpha Released, New Javascript & Rendering engine, 7x faster | Hacker News Reader

Opera 10.5 Alpha Released, New Javascript & Rendering engine, 7x faster

taranfx.com

46 pointstaranfx33 comments

I'm a long time user of Opera. Always surprised why it is very underrated.

Just for the record : * Opera is and was the fastest browser on limited memory/cpu machines * Opera is the most user friendly browser, it has always been so. (tabs, sync, speed dials, quick preferences, full zoom, email client, irc, skins, notes, downloader (btw, opera has the best "builtin" browser downloader ever, you can actually open files while downloading), history search (yes, opera's history search is the best), debugger and countless of small other useful details & features)

This browser is simply a treasure, yes I have tested every other browser and I keep a copy of FF with a bunch of plugins.

Chrome comes very close. Its interface is actually cleaner than Opera's. I used to use Opera, but now I'm using Chrome. This new Opera has a better interface that leaves most screen space for the actual website, much like Chrome. Maybe I'll switch back to Opera.

chrome is taking the good path but its hard to stop some of the opera habits, including F4, F12, "/", past&go, direct search in Wikipedia/ebay

Exactly! It was so tough for me to change from Opera to chrome. But chrome is much more minimal and the faster load time was enough of a killer feature for me to switch. But this version is pretty impressive.

Not only that, according to this: http://www.geektechnica.com/2009/12/move-over-chrome-opera-n...

Opera even beats the webkit nightly in sunspider benchmark.

On windows. It makes a lot of sense to specify an OS in these cases.

I did a benchmark with Opera 10.50 alpha Chrome 4 dev and Safari 4. While the numbers not the same, Opera is still faster than Chrome and Safari. I didn't try webkit nightly because chrome dev outforms webkit nightly in my previous tests.

You can check it yourself.

> Opera is and was the fastest browser on limited memory/cpu machines

I used Opera 5 on my 50 MHz 486 when no other browser was truly up to the task. Continued using it on other machines until Safari 2 hit on the Mac.

I've always thought that Opera was by far the best browser out there, but Safari integrates so well with Mac OS X and ends up being quite good with SafariStand and Saft (now using Glims). I might go back to Opera someday though.

More details from the Opera developer blog can be found here: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2009/12/22/from-all-of-...

>Most interactive dialogs will no longer block tabs or disturb your work flow. Tab specific dialogs (like javascript popups) are displayed as part of the tab in an overlay, so you can easily switch tabs without have to move or close the dialogs.

I really hope this becomes more widespread. I hate greedy focus-grabbing alerts.

Also, Opera is of course the malware writer's choice du jour because it's tighter than a pigeon's chuff.

Quite funny seeing the recent Firefox menu button being a complete rip off of the leaked Opera 10.5 build.

The versioning nomenclature seems somewhat chaotic... here it says 10.5 and their current version is 10.10 and on the linked page they refer to 10.1 and also talk about 10.50. I guess that 10.10 == 10.1 and 10.5 == 10.50 but it is a bit confusing...

Oh, and the download crashes with SIGBUS on my MacPro running 10.6 :(

Actually, the 10.10 is because of the Unite component. When they released the official new version, 10, they didn't have Unite ready yet, it was on another branch, the 10.10 (they reserved a few numbers for hotfixes for the version without Unite).

More details on the javascript vm: http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2009/02/04/carakan

From my somewhat limited knowledge of such, it seems like they took a fairly similar route as the Webkit guys. (Register based, etc..)

Thought I'd give this a try since I never gave Opera much of a chance, and I'm usually very tolerant of alpha/betas as long as they mostly work.

Lasted about half an hour - Google Reader doesn't seem to work right, and GMail also stopped responding after a while.

I've had zero issues with Google Reader and GMail with all prior 9.x and 10.x releases. So maybe your experience is particular to this alpha release.

If the default browser in OS X was as crappy as the default on Windows, I'd now be using Opera, with Chrome in a really close second.

Firefox has a million extensions, but speed matters more to me.

Known issues: JIT doesn't work on CPU's without SSE2 Wow a JIT working with SSE2! No wonder it's 20 percent faster than chrome

Is it? I just downloaded this alpha and ran SunSpider. Chrome 4.0.266.0 got 506.8ms +/- 6.6%, Opera got 763.4ms +/- 4.4%.

Phew maybe you're right I admit I just saw a comment on the opera desktop team blog and haven't tested it myself. However browser benchmarks are tricky - people can get quite different results on different machines...

It might be machine dependent. For me on an AMD Semperon:

Opera 10.5 alpha: 700.8ms +/- 0.8%

Chrome 4.0.266.0: 840.4ms +/- 4.2%

Certainly. Processor, OS, RAM, etc will matter a lot.

FWIW I ran in a Core 2 Duo P9500 with W7 64, 4gb of ram.

On a Mac book pro and Opera 10.10, I got: 5260.6ms +/- 0.7% I'll try with the new version and report back.

If there was some sort of adblockplus for Opera I'd jump ship from Firefox in a heartbeat.

There's AdSweep at http://adsweep.org/ - I've never managed to get it to work on Opera 10 under Ubuntu, but I find it works well on Chrome and plenty of people have given it good reviews.

I'm not sure Privoxy is as smooth as Adblock, but it might be worth a try: http://www.privoxy.org/user-manual/quickstart.html#QUICKSTAR...

so sad that this is the case, but it is :( adblock seems to have a record (for my personal use at least) as almost never having a false positive. privoxy on the other hand seems to block all sorts during actual use that aren't really ads, especially flash.

Actually, Opera has already the ad blocker, named "content blocker", for some versions already. Find more details at this address: http://my.opera.com/Tamil/blog/ad-block

I've used the same reason for avoiding Google Chrome. However, there is hope! I found an excellent "urlfilter.ini" list for Opera this morning.

http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/

I'm happily using Opera instead of FireFox now. It's FAST and I have more screen space available.

Opera has had ad blocking built in since at least 9.x, if not earlier. It does the job for me; I don't find it wanting. You can point and shoot to block anything that happens to get through the default filters, and the filtering takes wildcards by default, even. Meaning clicking an ad will block all ads from the same domain or parent path (e.g. adserver.tld/ads/*). Shift click to block just a specific image. The common text ads are also filtered.

Am loving the new Win7 integration with this release. Definitely feels snappier!

The new look and feel of the Mac version is very similar to Safari.

Windows 7 user here. It's been a long time since I tried out Opera properly last time, but I have to say this new release is snappy, smooth and very, very clean. And unlike Chrome it actually tries to mimick the native UI conventions without getting boring.

And as other's have mentioned, the Windows 7 add-on features are a nice bonus.

I like this very much.

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