Opera 10 Benchmarked and Evaluated 277
CNETNate writes "Dial-up connections and flaky Wi-Fi are made significantly more tolerable with Opera 10, it seems. After yesterdays news that Opera 10's first beta had landed, some testing was in order. One major new feature is Opera Turbo — server-side compression — which shrinks pages before sending them down your browser. With a 100Mbps connection throttled to a laughable 50Kbps, Opera 10 proved itself to outperform every other desktop browser on the planet, and there are graphs to prove it. Javascript benchmarks put the new browser in fourth place overall, after Chrome 2, Safari 4 and Firefox, but it indeed passes the Acid3 test with a perfect score. If you ever use a laptop on public Wi-Fi, to not have Opera 10 installed could be a big mistake"
Squid + Gzip (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Phenomenal browser (Score:5, Informative)
i've been using opera for quite a while, and i agree that it is an awesome browser.
the main problem however is that it's got bad compatibility with lots of sites. not really their problem, just that many sites don't bother to make sure everything works with opera.
besides obvious things like online banking, and microsoft junk, i've since a few weeks been having problems on facebook. lots of things suddenly stopped working, and it's seriously annoying....
Re:Squid + Gzip (Score:3, Informative)
They're definitely doing more, for example image recompression (perhaps using better at low quality setting format than jpeg, like jpeg2000, for example?)
Re:Does not work with Fortigate web interface (Score:4, Informative)
I don't use Opera myself, but as far as I'm concerned, if Opera passes ACID, the problem is with your firewall's web interface. It's not Opera's fault your software is non compliant.
Re:Squid + Gzip (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Phenomenal browser (Score:5, Informative)
...It definitely feels faster than the other major browsers...
Especially since it remains fully responsive with much bigger number of open tabs than other browsers. So...you just open interesting pages in new tabs by middleclick where they load without locking the UI (Opera is quite multithreaded AFAIK) and wait, ready, for you (yeah, in that light I'm not that interested in Opera Turbo feature...perhaps when I'll be on 3G)
Plus it has several properly implemented ways of navigating said large number of tabs tabs (you don't have scroll tabbar or "window" menu, sidebar has treeview, and..."hold down RMB and, without releasing, move scrollwheel"), and also full keyboard navigation.
Re:Now test HTTPS performance (Score:5, Informative)
They say in their specs they do NOT compress https at all.
Those are encrypted pages you're requesting, which jumbles up the data. Jumbled data does NOT compress well at all. Plus, they're 'secure.' You don't want someone else handling your secure files.
Re:Nobody gives a shit (Score:5, Informative)
Opera uses its own UI toolkit. Qt is only used in things like file selector in Linux version.
Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons (Score:4, Informative)
The reason why some sites don't work well in Opera is that webdevs at your place still think in terms of browser monopoly, "we can just target IE", only they exchanged it for browser duopoly "we can just target IE and Gecko". I think it will improve though, with Webkit on the rise, which is similarly standards-compliant and nonstandards-intolerant to Opera. Yeah, a bit chicken and egg problem.
Once your part of the web becomes browser-agnostic, Opera will work great. Like it is here to a large degree; current stats:
- Gecko 46.8%
- IE 42.8%
- Opera 8.4%
- Webkit 2%
Even better in one neighbouring country, IMHO:
- IE 41%
- Opera 31.9%
- Gecko 24.5%
- Webkit 2.6%
And not because of much larger Opera usage; as you can see, they seem to go towards roughly equal usage share of all major engines (with Webkit/Chrome (no Macs here...) having also relatively more rapid uptake), of which I would be glad the most. Everybody could use the engine/browser they simply like more.
BTW, content-wise, my part of the web is rather poor so I usually browse through "IE & Gecko" dominated part...and it's already good IMHO (though that might have something to do with the kinds of sites I browse...)
Re:Ugly. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons (Score:3, Informative)
DownThemAll is trivial to implement in UserJS; apart from that Opera can list all links on given page.
More than just list all links on a given page, you can do a search for specific links, including by extension. If you do ".jpg", you can then highlight them all, right click, and save them all to the default folder. Thus, you've downloaded them all.
Re:Phenomenal browser (Score:2, Informative)
It's fairly absurd, really. The push that broke things did not seem to introduce any visible changes to the site, only internal changes that don't work in Opera. The errors also affect Facebook Connect, so every site on the Internet using Facebook connect suddenly no longer works in Opera.
Re:Opera should get off the high horse (Score:3, Informative)
Not to mention so much of the web is still a horrible mess of tag-soup where each browser vendor has had to make up support, and each other vendor has had to guess or reverse engineer what its competitors are doing.
Further to that Opera has, on at least two occasions that I remember, encountered examples of broken code because they support too many standards. Most notably in the case of when they introduced WebForms 2 support and several sites using previously non-standard values (the spec said all unknown values should be treated as "text") for <input type=""> suddenly were using values that meant very different things. There were also many problems caused because Opera was I believe the only browser to ever correctly support the third parameter of addEventListener(). Opera has since had to break its support because Mozilla concluded that too many sites would break if they implemented fully-correct support and ultimately I believe the spec has, or will be superceded with a version that reflects that end result.
And as a final point in my not-so-subtle suggestion that the biggest problem with site compatibility is actually web developers not knowing their job properly: Opera 10's user-agent is actually "Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.00" because several high-profile sites assumed that no browser would ever reach a double digit version number (Flash has also seen this problem in a few places since version 10 of the plugin arrived.)
Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software (Score:5, Informative)
At those speeds, delivering internet pages is more latency bound than transfer speed bound. You always have to wait [your ping to the page] + [time it takes to transfer data to you]. With broadband, the first is usually larger than the last, so you won't get any speedup. Certainly not if you add an extra step to the mix, opera's server. Then you have [your ping to the opera server] + [opera's ping to the page] + [time it takes to transfer data to you through opera].
In short, Opera Turbo will only work when the time it takes to transfer data is way larger than the ping.