Opera 10.5 - the keyword is: speed.

[vredley]

Browser wars are great! :D

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2009/12/17/christmas-comes-early-for-opera-users

[pwnst*r]

WOW, WOW, WOW!!!!

IT WILL BE THE BEST CHRISTMAS GIFT FOR ME EVER!

fanboi alert.

[vredley]

Maybe he just gets terrible presents every year. Socks and the like.

[Elfy]

I'd rather have socks

[vredley]

Even if they were 85% polyester?

[Elfy]

Especially ...

[vredley]

Whatever floats your boat, but I think I'd go for the browser. :p

[Elfy]

ha ha ha

I wouldn't really want polyester socks - but I can never get the fonts in opera to look anything other than rubbish :)

and are you still testing jaunty?

[HappinessNow]

I'd rather have socksSmart Wool Socks!

[gs777]

May be , but I have dual boot system with win 7 64 bit & karmic 64 bit. on karmic I have all the three, fox, chro..,and "pera'.On windows resides "pera 'and ie8. Of all the five it is firefox which is the fastest.I do not have a DSL broadband , only edge datacard. It is only fox that cares my resources. IE8 is most arrogant and resource demanding. pera not available for 64 bit windows and on linux it is slowest.hence only fox......fox ...... be fire or water only fox.

[vredley]

ha ha ha

I wouldn't really want polyester socks - but I can never get the fonts in opera to look anything other than rubbish :)

and are you still testing jaunty?

Any word on the release date? :)

I've never had any trouble with fonts in Opera, but it does have problems rendering some websites. On the other hand, it's fast and works very well on a small screen (I've got an original 7" Eee PC). I'm looking forward to 10.5.

[Elfy]

Any word on the release date? :)

They put it back a few years I think ;)

[vredley]

Very sensible. Better safe than sorry, I say.

[donniezazen]

Can it really beat the sleek Chrome?

[vredley]

Probably not in the benchmarks. But I'm a bit suspicious of those benchmarks tbh - Chrome and Opera seem equally fast in actual use. Perhaps it's just me slowing down.

[MellonCollie]

A leaked Windows version of the pre-Alpha has Windows 7 integration (glass interface, per-tab thumbnail previews, jumplist) and per-tab private browsing, but no JS rendering speed improvements apparently. Let's hope they're saving that for the official release.

[Colonel Kilkenny]

A leaked Windows version of the pre-Alpha has Windows 7 integration (glass interface, per-tab thumbnail previews, jumplist) and per-tab private browsing, but no JS rendering speed improvements apparently. Let's hope they're saving that for the official release.

Carakan (the new JS interpreter) is not in the leaked build, but that doesn't mean that JS speed wouldn't be better.
Example: http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2009/12/18/native-json-support-in-opera

[Colonel Kilkenny]

.I do not have a DSL broadband , only edge datacard.

I'm too lazy to respond to the whole post but if you're using edge connection then Opera is the fastest browser without any doubt. Thanks to Opera Turbo which was designed just for situations like that.

[The Real Dave]

For me, Firefox is the fastest at loading pages, on all my computers. That said, on my older PC, the interface seems slower, compared to Chromium, but lack of decent Ad-Block in Chromium is killer. So, Firefox for me :)

Gonna go try out Opera now, and just don't get me started on IE :) If it were possible to remove it easily from my Windows installs, I would gladly do so, but its a weed with damn deep roots :(

[ratcheer]

The new Opera is very nice and it is my second favorite browser, but I still use Firefox 95% of the time.

Tim

[MellonCollie]

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

Windows and Mac only.

[Frak]

I'd rather have socks
I'm with this guy.

[sertse]

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2009/12/22/from-all-of-us-to-all-of-you

New engine, interesting. Could someone explain Vega to me though? It's supposed to well rendering, and (eventually) bring hardware acceleration to web browsing, (which sounds nice... we hear about hardware accelerated graphics and it's meant to be good...), but what is it really about?

More interesting is that they are moving away from QT altogether, yet keeping desktop integration. I'm guess they are writing their own toolkit, like how Firefox uses Xul to fake gtk, but Opera's will fake both gtk and qt.

[Frak]

New engine, interesting. Could someone explain Vega to me though? It's supposed to well rendering, and (eventually) bring hardware acceleration to web browsing, (which sounds nice... we hear about hardware accelerated graphics and it's meant to be good...), but what is it really about?

Well, Safari (on Mac) uses Quartz (HW Accelerated). The next Internet Explorer will use HW Acceleration. Now Opera will eventually have HW Acceleration. When will Firefox have it?

[YeOK]

Well, Safari (on Mac) uses Quartz (HW Accelerated). The next Internet Explorer will use HW Acceleration. Now Opera will eventually have HW Acceleration. When will Firefox have it?

Maybe before IE9 from what Mozilla said: Link (Tomshardware) (http://www.tomshardware.com/news/firefox-gpu-acceleration-dx11,9151.html)

[Colonel Kilkenny]

Well, Safari (on Mac) uses Quartz (HW Accelerated). The next Internet Explorer will use HW Acceleration. Now Opera will eventually have HW Acceleration. When will Firefox have it?

Only certain parts of Safari use GPU, it doesn't user GPU for normal page rendering. And Firefox has already a version where it uses Direct2D for rendering, but that is of course just a prototype and the actual release of hardware accelerated Firefox is still quite distant dream.

sertse: Vega is mostly about speed. Although page rendering in Opera has been probably the quickest of all browsers, using GPU makes it even faster as GPU is much better than CPU when it comes to certain things (like rendering stuff to the screen). Vega is now also used to render interface which means that it's probably easier to make more attractive GUI (animations, effects, etc. i.e. all stuff making the app more usable and pretty).

Dropping Qt was a big surprise for me. I would have guessed that they would have gone totally Qt instead of dropping it completely. But I guess it makes more sense to have one own toolkit as Opera has many platforms and Qt is not available outside Mac, Linux, Win, WinMo & Symbian.
Previous versions of Opera were partly using toolkit called Quick (IIRC), I guess the new toolkit is some sort of upgraded version of that.

BTW. This is posted from 10.50, it's frickin amazing already. Too bad they didn't have the time to deliver Linux version before Christmas.

[kaixi]

The new Opera beats Chrome 4 in both Sunspider and Peacekeeper (I'm using a Intel Core 2 Duo machine with 2 GB of RAM and Windows 7 32bit on it):

Sunspider
Opera 10.5 pre-alpha: 672.8ms
Chrome 4 Dev: 760.4ms

Peacekeeper
Opera 10.5 pre-alpha: 2679
Chrome 4 Dev: 2549

Too bad this pre-alpha is full of bugs, otherwise I'd use it as my primary browser. Nonetheless, once they iron out all the bugs it will be amazing.

[Frak]

Only certain parts of Safari use GPU, it doesn't user GPU for normal page rendering.

Actually, Safari relies heavily on QuartzGL. If QuartzGL is available, Safari swaps most of the rendering over to the GPU. Some things don't, but the heaviest things, such as font rendering and JavaScript, are swapped over.

[MellonCollie]

Happy New Year!

By Arjan van Leeuwen. Thursday, 31. December 2009, 23:01:00


When we released our pre-alpha version into the wild last week, we told you that a Unix release would follow later. Today, as a new year's present, we'd like to give you the chance to play with Opera 10.5 on Unix.

We also have a little extra for those of you on Windows and Unix: this build includes support for the video element!

Our Unix version is undergoing a lot of radical changes for the 10.5 release. It has been mentioned earlier that we are removing our dependency on the Qt libraries. By doing this, we hope to integrate better with the popular desktop environments out there, and we allow Opera to run without the need for a library that might or might not be installed on your system.

This means that you can run Opera without any graphical toolkit installed if you want to (plain X11), but if you do have toolkits installed, Opera will try to load and use them to integrate into the environment. Currently we are focusing on getting support for Gnome/GTK+ and KDE4/Qt4 into 10.5. The work on KDE4 integration is not at a stage yet where we think it can be used, so this pre-alpha release only has support for GTK. As a work in progress, you will notice that not all UI elements conform to their GTK specifications yet.

Like the other pre-alpha releases, the Unix build includes Carakan, our new javascript engine. The engine might be more unstable in 64-bit builds than in 32-bit.

Some features, such as printing and drag-and-drop functionality, are missing from this build.

Because this is a pre-alpha release, we don't recommend you to install it over your existing Opera installation. This is why we are releasing only non-installable tarballs instead of installable packages. To run Opera, extract the tarball and run './opera' from the main directory.

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/happy-new-year

:)