Comments on: Opera 10.50 out for Mac, impressive performance and more

By: eyelidlessness

eyelidlessness — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:14:42 +0000

@ywg,

seems like your experiencing some problem specific to your local environment/configuration.

Based on what exactly?

This is obviously not the user-experience that most of us get.

It’s not obvious to me. But even if you’re right, Opera is not in a position to ignore any user experiences, even if it’s “only” 18% (as represented here based on explicitly saying so, the only “obvious” data I have to go by).

Don’t forget it’s the very first beta of a major version featuring a new graphic and scripting engine : one should expect bugs or even poor experience if they’re unlucky.

And Opera would, in turn, expect complaints about bugs and poor experience.

By: stoimen

stoimen — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:30:18 +0000

I’d like to add that Opera will support the OGG Vorbis and Theora with the HTML5 video tag!

By: V1

V1 — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:57:04 +0000

These performance stats are always crap, you are comparing a latest build Opera with older builds of browsers. Of fucking course its going to be faster if you compare it in that way. But if you compare Opera with nightly / weekly builds of browsers you will see that Opera is not the fastest. Pointless graphs ftw.

By: vsync

vsync — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 11:16:41 +0000

Ok people. its very buggy, and doesn’t feel fast at all on websites I’ve tested it on, not to mention extreme CSS weirdness. seems jumpy and slow to me. nothing like FF or Chrome experience.

I’ll just have to wait to next year release, when it will be better I hope :p

By: vsync

vsync — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 11:08:23 +0000

Downloaded! now testing it myself.
I don’t like chrome, because as a web developer I have
found it to be very buggy. i’m with Firefox for the past 7 years now,
and we’re happy together. never tried Opera, but sure is time now!

By: ywg

ywg — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:54:50 +0000

@eyelidlessness : seems like your experiencing some problem specific to your local environment/configuration. This is obviously not the user-experience that most of us get.
Don’t forget it’s the very first beta of a major version featuring a new graphic and scripting engine : one should expect bugs or even poor experience if they’re unlucky.

By: eyelidlessness

eyelidlessness — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:17:39 +0000

I had to force quit it a few minutes after launch, as it never became responsive. Apparently the splash page it loads has an animated canvas that was bogging it down. Either Javascript or redraw performance was lagging so bad that the entire browser never became responsive at all.

Interaction with the browser UI is no better. Literally every single operation is choppy and delayed by a second or more.

Dragonfly is glacial. Simply opening it takes at least five seconds, and doesn’t seem to draw any content until attempting to interact with it *after* it has apparently loading.

It’s clear Opera has made great efforts to visually fit in more with the Mac appearance (a great deal better than Firefox, in my opinion), but they have a long way to go on feel/interaction. It’s unacceptable, for instance, for a right-click (context-click) to not only wait until mouseup to engage, but to be ambiguous about which context the menu is called on (try depressing the right mouse button, moving the mouse to another part of the screen, then releasing; what is the menu acting on?).

Javascript performance may be greatly improved, but it’s impossible for me to tell because the application itself moves at a glacial pace. This is on a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo with 3 GB RAM, running in a context where every other running application is instantaneously interactive. And this is a huge contrast from 10.1 (the last release I tried), which seemed pretty fast.

I haven’t spent a lot of time with the new smart address bar, but it seems pretty decent—much better than Safari, which is (along with IE) about the worst in the bunch at this point.

Points for effort, it’s clear Opera wants to be a viable Mac browser, but it’s far from the best option at this point. With Chrome improving rapidly, and playing leapfrog with Safari for best actual performance, even Firefox is a tough choice except where users depend on Firefox-specific add-ons. Opera needs to do more than try to be passably native and passably competitive in performance to get a leg up on its competition, particularly on the Mac.

By: lunes

lunes — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 09:57:12 +0000

Heh, you copied the list of improvements but forgot that this are improvements to the alpha, which already contains much more interesting features: http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/12/22/

By: blepore

blepore — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 01:12:40 +0000

This article could really have used the word BETA in the headline. :-p

By: DavidMark

DavidMark — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 22:06:46 +0000

It’s a shame that sites like MSDN, Adsense and Google Groups throw exceptions on every page when using Opera 10. Of course, that’s not Opera’s fault at all (just their unenviable burden). That’s what browser sniffing (the likely culprit) does for you. ;)

I like the thing, especially on older PC’s. Very snappy!

By: ywg

ywg — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:36:10 +0000

I’m glad to see Opera coming back on the top, this browser have been for many years the incontested leader in terms of compliance, standard implementation and javascript performance.
Kudos to the Opera guys, I’ll hope you’ll finally get the success you deserve !