Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
Opera 9.5 Alpha release reviewed. Gets some nice goodies.
Category: Opera
CyberNet News has got a review of the alpha release of Opera 9.5, which is due out Tuesday, Sept. 4th:
It looks like the Opera team really focused on the rendering engine, with some fast results displayed during CyberNet’s review. Ryan, CyberNet’s reviewier:
…decided to do a rather unofficial speed test to see how fast the different browsers rank in terms of loading our site (with an empty cache). I did three tests for each browser and averaged out the time it took for each to completely load our site. Here are the results with the slowest browsers first:
- Internet Explorer 7: 18 seconds
- Firefox 2: 15 seconds
- Opera 9.23: 12 seconds
- Firefox 3 Nightly: 11 seconds
- Opera 9.5 Alpha: 8 seconds
In addition, it looks like accessibility is big on the list of enhancements with enhanced support for Window-Eyes, Jaws, and VoiceOver on OS X as well as updated keyboard shortcuts to make navigation easier. You can get more info at the Opera Desktop Team’s recent blog entry about the release.
Seems to be really really buggy. In small tests even scrolling breaks stuff (e.g. areas keep showing the old content or white areas where the content is missing). Also the script engine seems to be slower than in Opera 9.2.x - when testing my qooxdoo application. Hopefully these things are already known and addressed by the developers.
Does it allow for overflow-x and overflow-y in it’s CSS?
@Sebastian: You should probably contact Opera directly about that to ensure that any performance issues are resolved. With Qooxdoo getting more and more top-notch features, I’m sure they’d be very interested in chatting with you.
fyi… the ‘reopen closed tabs’ feature was available in earlier releases.
@ahpatel: Reopen closed tabs, yes. Reopen closed windows (with all tabs remaining), however is new.
getElementsByClassName is supported, but an error results if more than one argument is passed. The extra arg should be ignored.
message: WRONG_ARGUMENTS_ERR
@Rey: Sure. This is already on my list. I will post the bugs when I can spent some time to do further tests.
@emehrkay: Yes it does both.
Every time a new version of Opera comes out I give myself an excuse to switch from Firefox but Opera never makes a compelling enough argument.
I also question the “open in a different browser” functionality. Why would Opera want to acknowledge the other browsers within its own?
Nice video preview.
@Sebastian Werner: Are you saying they shouldn’t? And back when I had firefox, didn’t it also have an “open in a different browser” functionality?
Sorry, meant that on David.
I’ll switch when the full version of Firebug supports Opera.