This week Opera pushed out the latest build of their browser, the 9.5 Alpha Edition. Initial tests show it to be faster than current offerings from Firefox and IE.
The Opera Desktop Team released the alpha build of version 9.5 of its desktop browser, available here. The browser represents the first release under the new "Kestrel" name--previous 9.x versions were named Merlin. The release supports Windows, Linux and Macintosh platforms.
The browser market, today is dominated by IE7 and Firefox 2.x. IE7 holds about 60% marketshare, with Firefox coming in second place, with 35%, according to the latest figures.
According to the latest statistics, "alternative" browser Opera holds a mere 1.9% of the market.
Opera's development is based out of Oslo, Norway. The first public release of the Opera browser was in 1996, with version 2.0. Opera, like Mozilla's software, has traditionally been offered free of charge, starting with version 5.0. Version 5.0 to 8.0 used in-browser advertising to pay for the development costs, but the ads were removed in version 8.5.
Opera introduced several innovations in terms of browsing. Some notable features are:
- All keyboard controls and shortcuts are easibly mappable in the browser.
- Page zooming of both images and text, from 20% to 1,000%.
- Voice control, co-developed by IBM, which reads webpage text aloud and accepts user input.
- Pop-up blocking and privacy control.
- Built in download service.
- Tabbed browsing--note: Opera was the first browser to offer this. Opera displays thumbnails of the page in the tab, and opens pages as true documents, unlike many other browsers. This allows you to resize different tabbed pages to different sizes.
Despite Opera's history of innovation, the question with this new release was if the challenge of competing with much larger production teams and budgets at Mozilla and Microsoft, would/ /be too much for Opera's development team.
Initial reports indicate that the browser is
shaping up quite nicely, despite the adversity of playing the underdog
to IE7 and Firefox 2.x.
Improvements in the 9.5 release include:
- Higher performance (faster page loadtimes)
- Full history search
- Improved site compatability
- Preview of bookmarks
The design team has released detailed change logs of the improvements and fixes. For a look at the Windows release change log, go to here.
The 9.5 build was put in a speed test against Firefox 2.x and IE7 on the blog Ars Technica and showed surprising performance. The test used Celtic Kane Online's javascript speed tests.
Run on the same platform, the 9.5 release at 281 ms load time was nearly twice as fast as the previous version 9.23 (546 ms). The new version also held significant speed advantages over Firefox 2.x and IE7. On Windows Vista, Opera 9.5 was reported to be around 50% faster than Firefox 2.x and 100% faster than IE7, according to these speed tests.
The blog also reports that the speed of torrent downloads using the built in download manager that supports torrents is greatly improved.
The blog also commends the new "Speed Synchronization" feature, which lets you remotely load your bookmarks and features remotely to a seperate machine in mere seconds.
One key feature that may offset some of these improvements, is the fact that the Opera browser still does not allow extensions, a very useful feature of the Firefox browser. The Opera browser does support Java widgets and user Javascripts, including scripts written for Firefox's Greasemonkey utility.
Despite this noticeably absent feature, Opera's alpha release sports good performance and seems indicative that final Opera 9.5 build is shaping up to be a solid competitor in the Firefox and Internet Explorer-dominated browser market.
|