Opera 9.5 Browser (Beta)

[DudeAsInCool]

Ars Technica takes a look at Opera's latest browser improvements:

Performance

Opera remains one of the fastest browsers on the planet: extensive tests of Opera 9 done a couple of years ago found it to blow away all contenders in a suite of tests that measured startup time, CSS rendering, table rendering, image display, browser history, and JavaScript speed.

I ran some JavaScript speed benchmarks on Opera 9.5 Beta 2 on my home system (Core2Duo at 1.8GHz, 2GB RAM, 256MB graphics card) to test how well it stacked up against version 9.0, and also against the latest versions of other popular web browsers. The benchmark I ran is fairly old, but seemed to produce reliable and repeatable results. On my system, Opera 9.5 Beta 2 was definitely the new speed champion, finishing the tests in 0.44 seconds. Opera 9 got a score of 0.86 seconds, with Firefox 2 coming in at 1.3 and the latest Firefox 3 Beta 5 coming in at a respectable 0.82 seconds. (I tested Safari for Windows, but because Safari reports JavaScript timers in a different way than all other browsers, the results could not be compared). In essence, Firefox 3 has caught up with where Opera 9 was in terms of JavaScript rendering speeds, but Opera 9.5 is, in some cases, up to twice as fast!"

Check out the Opera 9.5 Browser (Beta)