Opera pushes out 10.6 preview

re: Best Regexp Speed

On older hardware, Operas advantage is not as pronounced.

If your CPU does SSE2/SSE3 then Opera will totally slaughter Safari in benchmarks. On WIndows, Opera 10.60 is nearly 3x faster than Safari 5.

Hopefully...

I've forced myself to use Opera exclusively for the past 2 or 3 weeks. It was quite pleasant in some respects, I really want to keep using it, but also annoying in others (running 10.53 Linux beta on Ubuntu 10.4 and 9.10). I hope it gets better with the new version. There are a few showstoppers.

It's a very geeky browser. Tons of options, menus, sub-menus, etc. etc.. Which I liked, because I'm of a geeky persuasion (always preferred KDE for example, since it's so much more option rich than GNOME, or used to be before KDE4...). I quite like the Speed Dial thing, too. And it does feel quite faster than FF on my 8-year old home computer.

The problems? First, why the hell do the imported (from FF) bookmarks lose their original order and become alphabetical? That is quite stupid. Of course, after looking for the bookmarks two or three times you get used to the new position, but the old places, after years, are quite automatic, and should not be messed with. I looked for any option that tells how to order the bookmarks, but found none. Also, the bookmark layout is terrible to navigate, for some reason.

Second, it mangles several pages. It seems to have a problem with some CSS, I suspect. Those pages display fine on FF. E.g. some Yahoo News pages get all the content squished in a narrow vertical strip of some 50 px or so. Others, like the local Weather.com page gets elements all over the place, out of alignment. Most other pages look fine.

Third, the auto-completion in form text fields is junk compared to FF. It only remembers the few default ones you set explicitly in some configuration tab. But I have several email addresses, for example. I don't want it to always complete with that one only.

Fourth, the user/password management is flaky. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Depends on the site, it seems. I couldn't figure it out. But for El Reg for example I am sure I asked for it to remember the details, but it never fills them.

Fifth, it does not recognize the Java plugin on pages, although it sees it is installed (in the content details configuration tab).

I don't know if there is a "bug" report system for Opera where I could report these things. I never bothered to look because I am not submitting anything to something that is not FOSS.

Does it still leak memory....

Like an incontinent old man? I hope the development team has gotten that issue addressed, as I get tired of having to kill the process and restart every couple of hours or so.

It is especially annoying because I have used Opera since it came out, and, have been quite a fan of it. However, right now I am using Firefox, because of the memory leak problem. Typically on my system, Opera will go from using 20% of memory to using 75% of memory over a couple or three hours. I can even watch the memory usage slowly grow when the browser is just SITTING there!

Beyond that...it is a great piece of software.

regards

dave mundt

Working fine for me

@Andrew - "it doesn't bugger up your existing settings". That's right as it has its own ~/Library/Application Support/Opera 106 and ~/Library/preferences Opera 106. Clumsy if you want to maintain your existing settings as there is no option to copy them so you have to do it by hand. OTOH this means that an Opera beta cannot trash your existing install.

@Dave Mundt - no memory leak on the 10.5 series on Mac OS here. I usually run Opera for weeks and memory use is not excessive and considerably less than FF. Have you submitted a bug report?

@J 3 - password management is a pain. I have a problem with El Reg but I think this is either down to blocked content or cookies (El Reg loves cookies). Not sure if I'm the biggest fan of auto-completion à la FF or Safari but it could probably be sensibly extended. Manageable key values? I love the new quick access to site preferences via the GeoLocation symbol in the address bar!

As for speed - it feels a close run thing on Mac OS between Chrome and Opera. But sites like The Economist are always held back by the slow delivery of the embedded adverts even if they are blocked.

For those wanting to try out some of the new HTML5 toys above and beyond Apple's narrow view Monday's build has a view links to try:

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2010/06/14/html5-and-then-some

@J 3

"Fifth, it does not recognize the Java plugin on pages, although it sees it is installed (in the content details configuration tab)."

In my opinion no Java is a positive feature :P

I've always had a soft spot for Opera. I don't hold much stock in speed tests, so it may or may not be the fastest renderer. However, the fact that all the essential features - ad-blocking, mouse gestures, autopaging, spatial keyboard navigation, ability to create search shortcuts from any search box on the Web - are already there without extension bloat is what sells Opera for me.

Its UI is clunky in some places such as Preferences, but not as clunky as configuring a dozen add-ons in FF with their scattered menu options. Mostly however it feels really responsive, on a par with Chrome but with smoother scrolling and mouse gestures. I'll take a fast UI over 0.34% faster rendering on selected javascript torture tests any time.

@J3 @Dave Mundt

Opera is still beta on Linux. However some of the problems are also in the Windows build. El-Reg Wand problems are due to coding problems on El-Reg (they can't write W3C compliant code). Javaplugin is still W.I.P on Linux. Bookmark manager does suck, but I rarely use it, as I just type the name of the bookmark (or it's tag) in the address bar and it auto-completes it.

Memory leaking: Release builds of Opera rarely leak memory. I haven't seen anything in release builds (some of the betas of 10.5x did). More often it's peoples mis-understaning of how Windows manages the working set. http://my.opera.com/mitchman2/blog/show.dml/167116