Opera has released an alpha build of their upcoming 9.5 release. "Following the release of Opera 9 last year, we re-wrote Opera's rendering engine for the coming Opera 9.5 release. As a result, Opera 9.5 contains more than a year's worth of speed, standards and performance improvements."
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Member since:2005-06-29
Since the 8.x series, Opera has been the best browser in all areas (speed, features, security, etc...). Much faster and feature-rich than Firefox or IE for instance. I yet have to see what they could do to improve it!
But yet, Opera has lost the battle because of the ads. People got pissed off having to pay or to see ads. Many people have been mad at Opera since then even if it's now free of charge and ad-free at the same time. Some ignorants also still think Opera is adware.
Opera Software understands that and now left the desktop and targets the mobile market.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-08
Many people have been mad at Opera since then even if it's now free of charge and ad-free at the same time. Some ignorants also still think Opera is adware.
There's still the matter of Opera being proprietary software.
Firefox was not only able to build a stronger brand and a larger extention ecosystem, but embedded developers are using the Firefox codebase to build specialized web environments without paying for Opera. If that wasn't enough to contend with, WebKit has enormous momentum behind it now that Apple and KDE are reunited.
That said, Opera 9.5 seems to be somewhere in between Firefox 3 and 4 in terms of core technology. It doesn't have the offline application functionality of FF3 or the high-level scripting support slated for FF4, but the ECMAScript virtual machine is probably more comparable to the latter.
Opera is great technology. But a web platform certainly qualifies as a basic commodity these days, and that doesn't bode well for a proprietary software vendor with a marketshare problem. You have to wonder whether Qt-style dual-licensing is inevitable for Opera.
Member since:2007-09-05
Member since:
2005-11-10
All this does is just saddens me at how far behind IE is, and how the largest portion of users still suffer with it.
If Opera can show just how good a browser can be, it only shows up Microsoft's complete incompetence and unwillingness in the browser space. If you're using Windows, even if you're not using IE, you're still helping Microsoft keep that status quo.