

Opera 10.5 Alpha Released, New Javascript & Rendering engine, 7x faster - taranfx
http://www.taranfx.com/opera-10-5

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karatchov
I'm a long time user of Opera. Always surprised why it is very underrated.

Just for the record : * Opera is and was the fastest browser on limited
memory/cpu machines * Opera is the most user friendly browser, it has always
been so. (tabs, sync, speed dials, quick preferences, full zoom, email client,
irc, skins, notes, downloader (btw, opera has the best "builtin" browser
downloader ever, you can actually open files while downloading), history
search (yes, opera's history search is the best), debugger and countless of
small other useful details & features)

This browser is simply a treasure, yes I have tested every other browser and I
keep a copy of FF with a bunch of plugins.

~~~
jules
Chrome comes very close. Its interface is actually cleaner than Opera's. I
used to use Opera, but now I'm using Chrome. This new Opera has a better
interface that leaves most screen space for the actual website, much like
Chrome. Maybe I'll switch back to Opera.

~~~
karatchov
chrome is taking the good path but its hard to stop some of the opera habits,
including F4, F12, "/", past&go, direct search in Wikipedia/ebay

~~~
Ennis
Exactly! It was so tough for me to change from Opera to chrome. But chrome is
much more minimal and the faster load time was enough of a killer feature for
me to switch. But this version is pretty impressive.

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cninja
More details from the Opera developer blog can be found here:
[http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2009/12/22/from-all-
of-...](http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2009/12/22/from-all-of-us-to-all-
of-you)

~~~
RyanMcGreal
>Most interactive dialogs will no longer block tabs or disturb your work flow.
Tab specific dialogs (like javascript popups) are displayed as part of the tab
in an overlay, so you can easily switch tabs without have to move or close the
dialogs.

I _really_ hope this becomes more widespread. I hate greedy focus-grabbing
alerts.

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dirtbox
Also, Opera is of course the malware writer's choice du jour because it's
tighter than a pigeon's chuff.

Quite funny seeing the recent Firefox menu button being a complete rip off of
the leaked Opera 10.5 build.

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voidpointer
The versioning nomenclature seems somewhat chaotic... here it says 10.5 and
their current version is 10.10 and on the linked page they refer to 10.1 and
also talk about 10.50. I guess that 10.10 == 10.1 and 10.5 == 10.50 but it is
a bit confusing...

Oh, and the download crashes with SIGBUS on my MacPro running 10.6 :(

~~~
gnoupi
Actually, the 10.10 is because of the Unite component. When they released the
official new version, 10, they didn't have Unite ready yet, it was on another
branch, the 10.10 (they reserved a few numbers for hotfixes for the version
without Unite).

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maximilian
More details on the javascript vm:
<http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2009/02/04/carakan>

From my somewhat limited knowledge of such, it seems like they took a fairly
similar route as the Webkit guys. (Register based, etc..)

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lt
Thought I'd give this a try since I never gave Opera much of a chance, and I'm
usually very tolerant of alpha/betas as long as they mostly work.

Lasted about half an hour - Google Reader doesn't seem to work right, and
GMail also stopped responding after a while.

~~~
Pistos2
I've had zero issues with Google Reader and GMail with all prior 9.x and 10.x
releases. So maybe your experience is particular to this alpha release.

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lovskogen
If the default browser in OS X was as crappy as the default on Windows, I'd
now be using Opera, with Chrome in a really close second.

Firefox has a million extensions, but speed matters more to me.

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yread
_Known issues: JIT doesn't work on CPU's without SSE2_ Wow a JIT working with
SSE2! No wonder it's 20 percent faster than chrome

~~~
lt
Is it? I just downloaded this alpha and ran SunSpider. Chrome 4.0.266.0 got
506.8ms +/- 6.6%, Opera got 763.4ms +/- 4.4%.

~~~
cninja
It might be machine dependent. For me on an AMD Semperon:

Opera 10.5 alpha: 700.8ms +/- 0.8%

Chrome 4.0.266.0: 840.4ms +/- 4.2%

~~~
lt
Certainly. Processor, OS, RAM, etc will matter a lot.

FWIW I ran in a Core 2 Duo P9500 with W7 64, 4gb of ram.

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meroliph
If there was some sort of adblockplus for Opera I'd jump ship from Firefox in
a heartbeat.

~~~
cpach
I'm not sure Privoxy is as smooth as Adblock, but it might be worth a try:
[http://www.privoxy.org/user-
manual/quickstart.html#QUICKSTAR...](http://www.privoxy.org/user-
manual/quickstart.html#QUICKSTART-AD-BLOCKING)

~~~
etherealG
so sad that this is the case, but it is :( adblock seems to have a record (for
my personal use at least) as almost never having a false positive. privoxy on
the other hand seems to block all sorts during actual use that aren't really
ads, especially flash.

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Torn
Am loving the new Win7 integration with this release. Definitely feels
snappier!

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inffcs00
The new look and feel of the Mac version is very similar to Safari.

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trezor
Windows 7 user here. It's been a long time since I tried out Opera properly
last time, but I have to say this new release is snappy, smooth and very, very
clean. And unlike Chrome it actually tries to mimick the native UI conventions
without getting boring.

And as other's have mentioned, the Windows 7 add-on features are a nice bonus.

I like this very much.

