Opera 10.5 Final for Windows Brings the Speed [Downloads]
Author: Tiffany Shoman
Windows: As expected, Opera made version 10.5 of its browser official this morning, calling it “the fastest browser on Earth” and also touting its Windows 7 integration, HTML5 video support, better private browsing, and more.
In terms of HTML5 and video, Opera has gone the way of Firefox, supporting native, Flash-free streams of the Ogg Theora format, but not H.264. Apple’s Safari supports only H.264, and Google Chrome supports both. Opera has also added in extensive Windows 7 graphical look and taskbar support, as we’ve detailed, and also added the seemingly requisite “private browsing” option.
What the Opera developers are really touting, though, is Opera’s JavaScript and page loading speeds—and we don’t blame them. Here are two quick reminders of how Opera’s 10.5 pre-alpha (labeled erroneously as a beta in these charts) fared against its competition. First in JavaScript:
And in “cold” (right off a reboot) and “warm” (having previously opened) start-ups:
Opera’s certainly managed to get everyone’s attention with their new Carakan engine, that’s for sure. In our own tests, Opera 10.5 feels very snappy and lightweight when moving about the web, and that’s without the server-caching Turbo is turned on.
Opera 10.5 is a free download for Windows systems only; Mac and Linux users should expect their own versions to follow very soon.
Props to Lifehacker
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@UnderLoK: It should matter *a bit* to you, because the increase in speed is clearly visible. Other than that, the benchmarks mostly help developers. The faster the engines are, the better and more complicated Javascript apps they can dish out. One operation is faster by a .01 of a second – now imagine the difference, when you have a thousand of those.
JarasM
@flute4jc: So Google and Apple pay licensing fees to include them in their browsers?
TehBeardMan
Browsers have been doing what graphics makers have been doing for ages, make a product which excels at the standard benchmarks.
Personally, a browser that is .01 seconds faster means nothing to most people (myself included) so I think the stats are meaningless. These kinds of numbers only mean something when a user has a task which would normally take 180 minutes and will now take 170, but as we all know the only thing the average person does with those kinds of times revolve around encoding (AV that is).
UnderLoK
@TehBeardMan: H.264 is encumbered with copyrights and patents in many places. To legally use it and release a product that uses it requires licensing. While I agree that in terms of quality, H.264 is better, and in terms of code, there is no reason not to support both, legal issues and politics get in the way.
flute4jc
@Ashutosh: I agree. But it is important to note that the extensions are what has caused firefox to be such a ram hog and have been the cause of most of the security bugs that have been found (much the way flash is terrible for exposing the system at large). I mean, I’m all for extensions — use them on firefox myself and love them — but if not done right they can destroy a wonderful browser.
Opera has taken its time to get competitive in the speed game (though it has always been decent), and now looks to be doing an amazing job of it. Maybe (and hopefully) they will take the same approach for extensions or plugins of some sort — I don’t think I could go back to not having ad-block plus.
flute4jc
Too bad the UI is still kinda clunky.
kasakka
Can’t wait to see some full benchmarks with 10.5 Final!
TruYuri
Why can’t other browsers do what Chrome does and support both Ogg and H.264?
TehBeardMan
Shouldn’t you drop the “is” in this sentence?
“In our own tests, Opera 10.5 feels very snappy and lightweight when moving about the web, and that’s without the server-caching Turbo is turned on.”
#tips
CaptSwerve
If only they allowed proper extensions, and not those God awful widgets…
I’m all over Opera for having so many features out of the box, but you do need extensions to make it work exactly the way you want it. I can do that with Firefox. I can almost do that on Chrome. Heck, I can even try on IE with IE7Pro and all!
I just Opera listens some day.
Ashutosh