The future of Opera (Speed)

[A Guy]

Opera 10.5 pre-alpha for Labs

Posted on December 22, 2009
by Roberto Mateu

Today we are releasing Opera 10.5 pre-alpha for Labs. This pre-alpha is based on the Evenes branch and includes Windows and Mac builds, with an UNIX/Linux version coming later.

As you may know, we don’t typically open to user-testing this early in the development cycle. However, we are really excited about what the Desktop team is cooking up and want your feedback.

Many of you have been asking for a glimpse of Carakan, or new ECMAScript/JavaScript engine, and today you’ll be able to play with it and a few other new technologies that will hopefully be part of our next major release.

Some disclaimers: What you’re downloading today is a feature-incomplete and likely unstable development build. Please handle with care, backup your data before you install and do not run in hydroelectric power plants.
What’s new
Inside
Carakan

Carakan is our new JavaScript engine. It’s fast, more than 7x faster in SunSpider than Opera 10.10 with Futhark on Windows (Mac optimization is not as far along). You can read more gritty details regarding register-based bytecode, automatic object classification and native code generation in the Opera Core blog.
SunSpider Javascript Benchmark (runs per minute)
Carakan
144.93
Futhark
19.63


Higher is better. Performed in Windows 7, Core2Duo 6550 2.33 GHz.
Presto 2.5

We are now using Presto 2.5, which contains a huge numbers of improvements. It also includes support for CSS3 transitions and transforms, and more HTML5 features like persistent storage.
Vega

Vega is our new graphics library. It’s currently software based and displays everything you see on-screen. Vega can be hardware accelerated, but as you can see from the complex graphics benchmark in Peacekeeper, we don’t seem to need it yet. (Note that Futuremarks Peacekeeper test does no include the results of their complex graphics tests in the overall score. We believe this is wrong in 2009 and will simply be silly if not changed in 2010.)
Peacekeeper Complex Graphic Benchmarks
Opera 10.5 (Vega)
8513
Opera 10.10
2657


Higher is better. Performed in Windows 7, Core2Duo 6550 2.33 GHz.
Outside
Platform integration
On Windows 7/Vista, you will notice a lot of visual changes and use of APIs which allow the UI to display the Aero Glass effect. For Windows 7, we also added Aero Peek and Jump List support to easily access your Speed Dials, Tabs, etc. from the Taskbar.
For Mac, a complete rewrite in Cocoa brings an Unified Toolbar, native buttons and scrollbars, multi-touch gestures (try 3-Finger Swipe Left/Right or Pinch to zoom) and a bunch of other small details. We also added Growl notification support.
“Private tab” and “Private window”

You can open a new Private tab or Private window that forgets everything that happened on it once closed.
Non-modal dialogs

Dialog boxes (JavaScript alerts, HTTP authentication, etc.) are now non-modal and are displayed as a page overlay. This allows you to switch tabs or windows while the dialog is still displayed. Similarly, the Password Manager dialog is now anchored at the top of the page won’t block any content as it loads a new page.
Address field and Search field improvements

Both fields have been upgraded in looks and functionality. They can now remember searches, support removing items from history and show results in a better layout.

http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/12/22/

Windows/Mac: Opera's developers have released a very unstable but promising version of their web browser into the open. What does Opera 10.5 have to offer? If a quick test is any indication, faster JavaScript speed than any browser out there.

Based on Opera's reports of their new JavaScript engine, Caraken, being "7x faster" than the standard Futhark engine built into Opera 10.10, we ran it through Mozilla's Dromaeo JavaScript tests, which combine Apple's SunSpider and Google's V8 JavaScript benchmarks. Pure runs-per-second speed isn't everything, of course, and engines can be built specifically to max out in these kinds of tests. That said, the results of Opera 10.5, rolled into our last round of browser speed tests, were more than a little impressive, using Dromaeo as a measuring stick:

The chart up top is pulled from our most recent speed tests, with Opera 10.5 pre-alpha results rolled in. It shows some, shall we say, notable improvement. The gHacks blog put 10.5 against Firefox 3.6 beta and Chrome's development build in the SunSpider and V8 tests and found that Opera either beat, or came very close to, Chrome, in those separate runs, and usually left Firefox in the dust. We'll have to put Opera 10.5 through its full paces when it's out of its very unstable build.


If you're the adventurous type and do want to give the pre-alpha a try, you'll also find improvements to the page rendering engine, new Private Browsing tabs and windows that don't track any history, and some interface and visual design tweaks, detailed in the post below. The big JavaScript improvements aren't as pronounced on the Mac build as on Windows, according to the development team, but are still there.

http://lifehacker.com/5432054/opera-...ivate-browsing

A Guy

[noaccount]

will that be enought? WE don't think so...
http://www.ghacks.net/2009/12/23/two...hing-to-opera/

[safeguy]

The 3 things that prevent me from switching to Opera...

1. Add-ons (Widgets aren't good enough)
2. Ad-block (AdSweep is not as good as AdBlock Plus)
3. Site compatibility (I came across a few sites that don't display correctly under Opera while browsing)

Speed is one thing...but it's not the only factor in deciding which is going to be my main browser...

[vickypark]

using it now and it seems faster than the old version, but it crashes a lot, this is what you can expect from a pre-alpha...but nice aero apperarance though

[noaccount]

yes it looks awesome... but i wonder why (like firefox 4.x) it also needs to look like chrome