Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha Is Out, and It's Fast

sgunhouse writes to let us know that, following a leaked internal build over the weekend, Opera Software has now released their official 10.5 pre-alpha. There are no Linux versions yet. And an anonymous reader adds, "Opera's 10.5 pre-alpha includes the Carakan JavaScript Engine. Benchmarks now show that Opera is competitive with Chrome, beating it in Sunspider and other tests. Safari, Firefox, and IE are all behind. This is still pre-alpha, so further speed gains should be expected."

I tried it out earlier

[pwnies]

...and was quite impressed. Very snappy, a better UI, some very nice tab management capabilities (ability to tile tabs horizontall/vertically, not sure if this was in previous versions or not). However the one thing I was even happier about was their new vega library. If you didn't read over the summary, it's a new graphics library that they're using for 2d animation/rendering which has the capability of being hardware accelerated. If you've tried out the direct2d build of firefox, you'll know how nice this is. Pages animate and scroll so smooth you'd swear it was warm honey running down Kiera Knightly's body.

Carakan is cross-platform

[A Friendly Troll]

Carakan is cross-platform. That cannot be stressed enough. Since Opera is used on a *lot* of devices, from mobile phones, over fridges (!) and airplane entertainment centres, to the Wii, this is truly a major step forward for Opera.

Looking forward to the final release!

Re:I tried it out earlier

[pwnies]

Something tells me that'd be cold honey very quickly.

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[daveime]

I hear ya bro, you've got 2 gigs, you might as well fill 350 megs with bytes to display about:blank.

Hang on though, which bytes are actually needed to display an EMPTY PAGE ?

Even considering he's storing the DOM which is basically a set of empty containers for js, document head, document body, css objects etc., why in fucks name does it take 350 meg ???

Re:Does it have Adblock?

[Rockoon]

You have fewer tabs open than most people?

Re:Alpha

[Rockoon]

Alpha's and Beta's also usually have debugging/trapping stuff in them so that users can more easily report problems, so there really isnt a general rule that alphas and betas are usually faster, or usually slower.

I'll say this tho.. I ran Opera 10 alpha for quite some time before the official release, and the official release was just as snappy.

Opera has always been snappy. It is arguably the best browser available and has always been a trend setter. They are playing a little bit of follow the leader this time, but they again seem to be doing it just as well if not better.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[ShatteredArm]

I personally switched over a few years ago because, at the time, Opera was the only browser with built in speed dial, mouse gestures, email, RSS, etc. without any need for third party extensions with security vulnerabilities. Those were the killer features for me.

Re:I tried it out earlier

[ZERO1ZERO]

Pretty surethis has been in Since about Opera 1. It was/is one of the features of Opera, having a full MDI interafce, where the tabs aren't just tabs, but actual windows that can be displayed together, resized, tiled, cascaded etc etc.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[HBoar]

I switched from FF when Opera 10 was in beta. I don't think there was any one killer feature, but it's UI responsiveness in linux was probably the main reason. At the time, it was a huge improvement over FF. I believe FF has improved a lot since then, but I'm sticking with opera due to a number of little things I like -- Speed dial, built in bookmark sync, built in (and fairly decent) email client, a "paste and go" option on the right click menu..... etc. None (or few) of the features are unique to opera, but they are packaged together in a browser that is very competitive in terms of speed under both linux and windows.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[ShatteredArm]

So, let me get this straight... You want Opera to compete with Firefox by stripping out features, and adding a feature that will allow users to install those former features, which are the same, except built by untrustworthy third party developers? I suppose if that's what you want, Opera is not for you.

Re:Carakan is cross-platform

[shutdown -p now]

Regardless of performance of JavaScript VMs, JS itself is far from a perfect language. Too many quirks, and oftentimes too verbose syntax, especially when you compare it to the likes of Clojure or Ruby.

As well, regardless of any JS perf improvements, it's not going to beat a statically typed language. JVM is still faster, for example (once it loads).

Re:Alpha

[AaxelB]

It is arguably the best browser available and has always been a trend setter. They are playing a little bit of follow the leader this time, but they again seem to be doing it just as well if not better.

Wow. That gave me a double whiplash. :)

Heh. How about, each final release of Opera is arguably the best browser available at the time. Right now, however, new versions of other browsers have superseded Opera's stable release (version 10 was good, but quickly overtaken). They're playing catch-up, but looking at this pre-alpha it appears they're doing a damn good job of it.

Sound better?

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[jp10558]

Am I the only one who thinks the Ribbon "perl" idea seems like a fix for a problem almost no one ever had (the old standard menu bar)? And generally is a worse implementation because it adds an extra click for no apparent reason?

Also, I must be the only one who got used to double clicking on the title bar to restore/maximize the window - how do you do that now? Have to hunt for a new button somewhere that is hidden in a drop down?

I know I'm a power user, but really, if I wanted a fisher-price OS and software, I'd go to Apple.

Now on to my Microsoft RANT:
They are the reason for this abomination that is the ribbon. While everyone else is trying to save space, they're bloating things, except when they've decided to totally change all their interfaces so they screw everyone who *ever used Windows before*. I mean, at least Windows 95 was an improvement, but the best new thing in Win7 that I can see is the built in search in the start menu (if you can even call it that, because now it's some sort of pop-up explorer window that YET AGAIN behaves differently depending on where you're in the menu (Top level vs All Programs)). Why? I mean, I could teach myself and most users GNOME, KDE, ICEWM or OS X with the differences between Win95 - Win7 interface. AND unlike in XP, you can't get it back. Win 7 default interface gives me nightmares of some unholy union of KDE 4 and Final Fantasy 10.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[jp10558]

Have you tried contacting the sites? They might be able to fix it faster than Opera can. If we remember the big FF push to tell sites things don't work in the browser, then we know it's a two way street.

Re:complete whats new and opinions

[shutdown -p now]

Am I the only one who thinks the Ribbon "perl" idea seems like a fix for a problem almost no one ever had (the old standard menu bar)? And generally is a worse implementation because it adds an extra click for no apparent reason?

The idea of Ribbon (and similar UI solutions) is that all functions that are frequently used should be one click away, and this may be achieved by stuffing some functions that are rarely used further than they used to be.

In case of browsers, at least, I wholeheartedly support this - I've had main menu disabled in Opera for a very long time. I never use it. Why would I want to?

Also, I must be the only one who got used to double clicking on the title bar to restore/maximize the window - how do you do that now?

Surprisingly enough, you double-click the title bar (or whatever is left of it, anyway).

Or, you use the normal maximize/restore button in the top right corner of the window

I know I'm a power user

If you're a power user, why would you want the main menu? Don't you just use keyboard shortcuts (and, in browsers, mouse gestures)?

They are the reason for this abomination that is the ribbon. While everyone else is trying to save space, they're bloating things

Sigh. Not this myth again.

Office 2007 Ribbon is narrower than the default set of toolbars in Office 2003. And, of course, you can minimize it (and just use the shortcuts).

Regarding your other complains - hopefully you can understand that a single UI won't work for everyone, and the natural way of handling this is to make it work better for most people, even at the expense of the few who got used to the old (and often less efficient or less intuitive) way.

If you find that Win7 shell UI isn't to your liking and annoys you way too much, well, it is still replaceable [wikipedia.org] as it had been since Windows 95, and there are plenty of alternatives. Heck, you can run Blackbox [bb4win.org] if you want.

Closed source doesn't always suck

[noz]

Closed source software stinks. Microsot Windows crawls. Anything good by Microsoft is purchased from a former developer. Adobe is not only slow to fix security holes; it continues to distribute software it knows has holes that are actively being exploited. At work I'm exposed to corporate shit by IBM that is used in every incorrect way possible (arguably IBM is a contributor to this problem). Closed source makes me want to vomit. No privacy. No security.

But then there's Opera: possibly the only closed source project that genuinely competes on quality: accurate, good interface, efficient, and even good security? Who knows.

But then I don't use anything closed source anymore, so perhaps I'm missing some other well deserved programs.