Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 5th Feb 2009 20:08 UTC
Opera has announced a new JavaScript engine. "Over the past few months, a small team of developers and testers have been working on implementing a new ECMAScript/JavaScript engine for Opera. When Opera's current ECMAScript engine, called Futhark, was first released in a public version, it was the fastest engine on the market. That engine was developed to minimize code footprint and memory usage, rather than to achieve maximum execution speed. This has traditionally been a correct trade-off on many of the platforms Opera runs on. The Web is a changing environment however, and tomorrow's advanced web applications will require faster ECMAScript execution, so we have now taken on the challenge to once again develop the fastest ECMAScript engine on the market."
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Member since:
2005-07-13
Wednesday, 3. December 2008
What's New
Below is an overview of the new functionality in Opera 10.0 Alpha 1.
Presto 2.2 Engine
Opera 10.0 Alpha 1 includes Presto 2.2 (Kestrel includes Presto 2.1.1), an updated version of Opera's Core. Presto 2.2 features numerous new features and loads of bug fixes, such as:
100/100 and pixel-perfect on the Acid3 test
New regular expression engine, which greatly improves performance
Improved CSS performance
Pretty-printing of unstyled XML
Web font support
RGBA and HSLA support
Selectors API support
Member since:2006-08-22
Member since:2009-02-05
Member since:2006-05-09
Member since:2005-11-13
IMO it is a high quality product, with a lot of features, providing an excellent user experience and that runs in a lot of platforms.
I will agree that it's got a lot of features, certainly more than Firefox out of the box. But don't agree that it provides an excellent user experience. Too many things still require hacking ini files and other types of voodoo to get working, and trying to move your profile to a different drive is a pain, especially on Vista.
IMHO, their Javascript engine is fine insofar as speed goes. They really need to concentrate more on usability tweaks.
Member since:2008-04-15
I will agree that it's got a lot of features, certainly more than Firefox out of the box. But don't agree that it provides an excellent user experience. Too many things still require hacking ini files and other types of voodoo to get working, and trying to move your profile to a different drive is a pain, especially on Vista.
IMHO, their Javascript engine is fine insofar as speed goes. They really need to concentrate more on usability tweaks.
IMHO, their Javascript engine is fine insofar as speed goes. They really need to concentrate more on usability tweaks.
what about typing opera:config into the address bar?
how hard is it to paste your old profile folder over the new one?
I used the same profile pretty much the whole time i used opera 9 on windows. opera on linux was pretty terrible for a little while but the current alpha has been great so far.
Member since:2007-03-04
Too many things still require hacking ini files and other types of voodoo to get working
I have never done it. Why do you need to edit .ini files?
trying to move your profile to a different drive is a pain, especially on Vista.
Just copy/paste C:\Users\David\AppData\Local\Opera\Opera
Couldn't be more simple
Member since:2005-11-13
Just copy/paste C:\Users\David\AppData\Local\Opera\Opera
About hacking ini files....
Let's say I want to move my profile to D:\Profiles\Opera (different partition) since that's where I keep profiles for all of my applications (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc), as it's easier to back up if everything is in one place, and I can easily format the C drive if I need to, as I know there are no important data files on there.
However....
1. How's Opera going to know where I moved these files to
2. What if I don't want the cache directory in there with everything else? No reason to back that up, right?
Edited 2009-02-06 18:49 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
Opera browser deserves more attention and marketshare than its competition.
IMO it is a high quality product, with a lot of features, providing an excellent user experience and that runs in a lot of platforms.
Good work Opera guys!
IMO it is a high quality product, with a lot of features, providing an excellent user experience and that runs in a lot of platforms.
Good work Opera guys!
I wish that were the case but I can tell you as a Mac user - they spend very little time improving the user interface let alone their abysmal support for Google services such as proper support for the rich text boxes used in Blogger and numerous other websites.
If Opera wish to at least win me over they need to get the fundamentals working properly instead of expecting all the internet world to change to suit their refusal to support the web as it exists today (ugly and non-compliant code galore).
Member since:2007-03-04
Member since:2005-07-06
Rich-text forms have been supported since the 9.x series. Gmail and HTML authoring for instance work perfectly in Opera.
I don't know for the Mac, but on other systems, Opera's minimalist GUI is a good thing IMO.
What exact problems do you find in Opera?
I don't know for the Mac, but on other systems, Opera's minimalist GUI is a good thing IMO.
What exact problems do you find in Opera?
Try copy and pasting into blogger rich text box - I never said it didn't support it - where in the post did I say that it didn't support it? I said "proper support for the rich text boxes used in Blogger and numerous other websites." which clearly means that they are supported, but not fully/properly/flawlessly supported. Just as one can say their sound card is supported but 90% of the features on the sound card are unsupported.
I also have found that the browser constantly hangs because of scripts used in the websites, whole websites bringing down the browser that would otherwise work flawlessly on Safari and Firefox. Again, I've lodged bug reports (no use complaining if you don't submit bug reports) and they haven't been fixed. I've done my part submitting bug reports - Opera on the other hand refuse to fix these bugs. I've done all I can do.
Again, I'd love to use Opera - Safari is bug ridden and is bogged down after a period of time in use (I have a single window with over 300 tabs open and I cry every-time I see the memory usage). Firefox buggy, slow and flawed - especially in regards to continuous crashes when loading websites or just stalling when loading websites for no reason - heck, I'll sit here watch eyetv and find that I can't watch tv whilst a website is loading in the background. So it isn't as though I'm adverse to the idea of running other browsers - its just that Opera has to fix things up before I move over to it.
Edited 2009-02-06 09:27 UTC
Member since:2006-02-20
Member since:2005-07-07
No, this is new news - which probably won't even be stable enough to go into 10.0.
It's a shame people make so much fuss over Javascript benchmarks - Opera is head and shoulders above anyone in rendering and UI performance, the things that actually matter right now.
It's a shame people make so much fuss over Javascript benchmarks - Opera is head and shoulders above anyone in rendering and UI performance, the things that actually matter right now.
Javascript is very important on today's web. It's used virtually everywhere and currently Opera's javascript performance is subpar. It really can affect your browsing negatively if you visit javascript heavy websites. This is an important development for Opera especially considering Webkit and Gecko's recent JS performance enhancements.
Member since:2006-02-05