Opera 10.5 for Windows Released - Claims to be the Fastest Browser | Hacker News Reader

Opera 10.5 for Windows Released - Claims to be the Fastest Browser

my.opera.com

36 pointsIndyan34 comments

Great! I love Opera, use it exclusively, and I wish it got a bigger market share.

Some things to love about Opera:

  * Superb keyboard support including reaching any link on the page quickly
  * Dragonfly
  * Home/Office Sync
  * Disable Images on a page immediately Shift+I
  * Incremental vim-like find with "."
  * List out all links on the given page (very useful for some threads)

This version looks really good. Private browsing at last! I can finally plan my vacations in private.

...plan your vacations in private?

so it's a surprise I guess?

Holiday making in Palm Springs I would assume.

Vegas.

What goes there, stays there.

It's the only type of vacation that would need porn-mode to plan ;)

I would like to add * Out of the box mouse shortcuts

Sadly, these points also show why Opera's market share won't be growing fast. Just think to what proportion of the audience points #1, #2, #5 appeal…

I just updated all my browsers and did the Sunspider tests on my Win XP box. Opera smokes them all.

Opera

============================================ RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals) -------------------------------------------- Total: 888.0ms +/- 10.8% --------------------------------------------

Chrome

============================================ RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals) -------------------------------------------- Total: 1187.2ms +/- 4.2% --------------------------------------------

Safari

============================================ RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals) -------------------------------------------- Total: 1282.2ms +/- 10.6% --------------------------------------------

Firefox

============================================ RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals) -------------------------------------------- Total: 2594.8ms +/- 13.9% --------------------------------------------

============================================ RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals) -------------------------------------------- Total: 15011.0ms +/-12.4% --------------------------------------------

Cleanup on aisle 7, please.

What is "surprising", however, is the rush to release this version. I mean, it was a process for months, of alpha, beta versions... Then RC came 3 days ago, and hop, gold already, even if still some bugs.

Surprising, but understandable, as the "browser choice ballot screen" they fought for is released this week. It's their chance to propose a "perfect" browser, the moment they will be the most exposed. So I can understand this decision, but I hope that there won't be too high bugs in it, lowering the image. Because it's easy to give up on a new browser on the first error.

Other than that, I have to admit that this new version is amazing, much faster and more pleasant to use.

The one thing Opera needs to do now is support it's userJS community, so many of Firefox's most popular extensions and plugins have been recreated for Opera, but few people know about them, making it somewhat of a deal breaker for many.

Sadly this is currently left to third parties like http://userscripts.org/

The reason for this is they're currently rather fiddly to install and configure for the layman, so if anyone knows how to create an all purpose and usable front end for javascripts, they're likely to be welcomed with open arms.

This shit is crazy. I have the tabs vertically down the side with thumbnails inside and found an option to tile all of the open tabs on screen at once.

Edit: Found the Z1 glass theme, and the new tab is just a huge pane of glass on Windows.

I just don't get why Opera doesn't allow clicking the few top pixels. It freaks me out when web browsers ignore Fitts' law.

Paste opera:config#UserPrefs|ChromeIntegrationDragAreaMaximized into the address bar and set the variable to zero to have it catch clicks on the tabs at the very top of the screen.

It is not working for me. I tried with various values (0, -1,..) and it does not seem to have any effect. (Yes, I restarted the browser)

Is this on Windows? I don't think it has the same top border profile on the other OSs. You did click Save, right? Just checking.

Yes. Windows 7. I did click save.

No idea then, sorry. Works fine on the two desktops and a laptop in front of me.

Edit: Ah, but I am using this skin: http://my.opera.com/community/customize/skins/info/?id=9281

How do I save the value? keeps returning to 1 after a restart

You click Save. Should be someplace lower down the page.

Yeah, that bugged the living HELL out of me.

After many years of using Opera I gave it up in favor of Chrome recently, but this version looks&feels so sleek that I might reconsider :)

I have been a huge Opera fan since its early incarnations (even paid for it when it wasn't free). Also participate in beta testing, etc. But the release of 10.x left sour taste in my mouth as it was buggy too often for me. Suffering from countless "last few elements loading" issues, broken web sites and most important a beatdown in js and page-loading tests I have done (and seen elsewhere) from the more agile upstarts of Chrome and Firefox releases as they tried to one up each other. Even IE8 tested faster at times for me in loading pages I frequented.

But ever since they released the "teaser" of this new Opera right before Xmas 2009 I have been stoked and actively following its development and testing just about every new snapshot/beta they put out.

I've tried other browsers with extensions and such but none of them seem to feel as complete and as integrated as Opera. Hence why I still use it despite my ventures into Chrome/FF and even Safari (chrome is really nice as well and would be my default had Opera not gotten the hint).

Anyway, I am enthusiastically downloading the 10.5 release right now. A very large thanks to all the Opera developers for their efforts into this amazing release in short time. Everyone should try it.

Hah, a chart with 1.0 = IE7. I like that basis.

On a side-note, I've noticed that Chrome has serious trouble opening a lot of tabs at once. While the UI stays responsive, it commonly takes almost twice as long to load ~40 pages as Safari, and I've yet to see Opera or Firefox get even close to that (though I haven't tried it for a while, the UI annoyed me too much).

On the default skin if you select show tab bar when needed the entire freaking top disappears, the window controls and the big red menu button. and it can't be dragged around. It's not a big deal but how did they not notice that in beta.

I would love to watch while a group of say fifteen people off the street (not hackers) who've been using Firefox, are asked to try out Opera. It would soon be mightily evident why Opera commands only some 2.1% of the market

I disagree.

I use opera myself and one day a friends mom asked me what it was and why I was not using Firefox. I told her and she asked if I would install it on her laptop. She had been using firefox for close to a year and after she tried opera for a couple weeks she loved it. She said that it was much faster and she loved how much less it would crash when compared to firefox. She also commented on the speed dial. Pretty good for a non-technical person.

For me opera never loaded pages as smoothly as firefox and chrome. Will try this.

From Pref->Advanced->Browsing configure it to redraw instantly.

That makes a very noticeable difference! Why isn't it the default?

"Opera 10.50 is the fastest browser we have ever produced."

It merely claims to be the fastest version of Opera, not the fastest browser. :)

check the home page. it states "The fastest browser on Earth".

btw, here are speed test results by BetaNews: http://www.betanews.com/article/Google-Chrome-5-loses-points...

On my terribly under powered netbook, it is by far the fastest browser. The only usable one, in fact.

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