go opera

Is this were I place speed racer comments?

Now, if only Firefox could speed up its incredibly slow display engine... JavaScript improvements don't help much if everything else sucks.

Yes. Even though Firefox is faster on sunspider tests Opera still feels faster while browsing. Probably because of the faster display engine but I don't know for sure.

Opera is an amazing browser all it's own. I love the speed, plus it runs a LOT better than FF on low memory configurations. Even on 1GB+ memory systems you can see a speed boost over FF - especially when multiple tabs are open. I always believed Opera was taking the right path - especially when they made it free.

Before someone comes along and calls me a fanboy, FF has it's ups too. Opera also has it's bugs. I make it my Business to report all that I find.

BTW, I use FF at work, don't have much of a choice seeing as how Opera lacks a full-featured FTP client, and my workstation has only 256MB of RAM. Can't run both at the same time - unless I want to take 8 hours updating a few pages.

hey, JS is not all. as long as FX has that lame back/forward mode and can't even open form submits in new tabs (opera: shift-enter or shift-click on submit button) I will use opera, no matter how fast FX's JS engine is. Don't need javascript anyway except for maybe youtube (where 90% of the javascript stuff is just there to annoy people).

Is it OPEN SOURCE?

Hey, JS is not all, as long as !

Klaus - You're kidding right? Do you mean those extra forward and back buttons in Opera that with everyone I show them to they can't figure out? And opening a form submit in a new tab being a required, deal-breaker feature? You're kidding. I've never come across a need to do that in the 14+ years I've been using a browser.

If you really must be able to submit forms to a new tab...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/483

Ferdinand den Hertog:"Opera still feels faster while browsing"
While Presto is obviously a lot faster than Gecko, the main reason I think for that is the HistoryNavigationMode feature. It's faster by design, not just by performance.

John T. Haller:"Do you mean those extra forward and back buttons"
No he doesn't - he's talking about HistoryNavigationMode. Essentially it loads back/forward from ram cache.

"that will definitely leave IE in a sad class all its own"
At long long last. Fingers crossed.

@Klaus: haha, that's a bit funny - I've been using Opera for 7 years and never missed that form submit feature, until yesterday during some development, and it annoyed me that it couldn't be done. And today I learn how!

Opera loads back/forward from ram cache?
I'm not getting it.. that's what Firefox does.

Running 3.2a1pre and it definitely doesn't. Nor can I find it in about:config. What am I missing?

I'm running 3.0.6, I thought it was doing it since Version 2 or so.
Anyway, I'm using the default settings, but it's controlled by browser.sessionhistory.max_entries and browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers . On my computer it seems to save 3 back/forward pages, probably limited by the amount of unused RAM.

Those two have no effect as far as I can tell, it's actually browser.cache.memory.enable (found it eventually) - but there's still a little delay. It's still not instantaneous.

thats strange.. it seems to be instantaneous.Try turning on "work offline"? Operas implementation is just better I guess..

Well yeah, Firefox takes about half a second to navigate back or forward...

Opera needs this much worse than IE does, if the stuff I work on is anything to go by. Just off the top of my head, here was how long it took a bunch of browsers (latest versions as of a month ago), to get to a JS-heavy page, 2 clicks from clicking the submit button on the login screen, all with a clear cache:

Firefox/Safari/IE7: about 1m:30 each
Chrome: 40 seconds (turns out V8's not just the placebo I thought it was)
Opera: ... over three and a half minutes! WTF?

Opera's "Fast Forward" is immensely useful on p0rn pages... it will pick up the next image link from the page you came from *hint* - which is immensely faster and efficient than going back and forward all the time.

Most major speed glitches come from unique weaknesses in each browser engine. For example http://nontroppo.org/timer/progressive_raytracer.html

Opera is about twenty TIMES faster than Firefox on that test. Probably due to issues with Gecko performance. I would like to see the same test with one image draw at the end of the generating process. So it's less of a Java math stresser and more of an HTML update stresser.

Oh, the one thing that makes no sense is this Open Source trumpet that folks keep wrapping their lips around. Collaboration is good. Especially when they can agree on this gathering of ideas and special rules called a "standard". If each group can make the standard work, what is the problem? The deeper majority of Firefox users have no interest in taking the thing apart or custom-building it, and Mozilla will threaten legal action if they do not take the extra steps to distinguish the results of their labor from core Firefox. That sounds as troublesome as it is "open". Besides, a closed body can more rigidly enforce a single style of coding, making it safer and easier to apply changes. Which is why Mozilla has layers to filter the efforts of outsiders into the product. That doesn't sound very open either. And Opera's closed core is flexible enough to turn it into whatever you want, even breaking all the features into entirely separate bodies. Why cut it open when it will dance any way you like?