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Opera's rendering speed is what made me switch to opera 9 some 2 years ago. It was 2-5 times faster than the second faster (that was against firefox 2, safari 2, IE7 beta and without chrome). But what made me stay was the little things that end up making your browsing a lot faster. My personal favorite is searching any site you want from inside the search bar.
The truth is that, speedwise, Opera was left behind. Apple became serious about Safari, Google entered the fray, Microsoft was forced to improve and Firefox rolled out a huge upgrade (in my opinion Firefox 2 was a piece of s***).
You also have to take into account that their current JS engine was not optimized for speed but for low memory usage. They are working now on a new engine which they claim that is 2.5 times faster than their current one with a lot more speed improvements coming. Check http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2009/02/04/carakan for more info. I hope we will see it in the next major update.




Member since:
2006-01-08
Long time Opera liker and been using Opera 10 since the very earliest alphas.
Whilst 10 is a big welcome improvement, especially to the mail client, which is actually very usable now.
Opera was always lightening fast, sadly 10 isn't. It's noticeably slower than Chrome and Firefox 3.5 - I'm guessing it's way faster than IE8 but then I could code my own web page faster than IE8 could render it!
Opera isn't as fast as I think it should be, nor as fast (relatively) as it once was, sure faster than 9.6 - but that wasn't hard. It also eats ram at an alarming rate and I'm hoping that this RC might address that and the memory freeing on quit (on my machine it takes the best part of 4 minutes to actually quit and release all it's allocated memory)
Good - it most certainly is:
Fast - it most certainly is NOT.
But I do still like it.