Introduction

Opera has consistently defied expectations about what a browser (and browser company) can accomplish. Begun back in 1994 as a research project at the Norwegian research company Telenor, the Opera browser was first released as version 2.0 in 1996, and ported to multiple platforms in 1998. Originally a paid-for browser, Opera became ad-supported with version 5, but the ads were removed in the 8.5 release, bringing the browser to completely free status. Version 9 offered many improvements, and now the company has released a second beta preview of version 9.5, which Ars first took a look at last year, back when it was in alpha.

I should say at the outset that I am a huge Opera fan, and I use the browser on my home computer, although at work I use a combination of IE7 and Firefox 2 (for testing purposes), and I am very impressed with the latest beta of Firefox 3. Each browser has its own strengths and weaknesses. However, I have found Opera (since version 9) to be a strong contender for the best all-around web browser, and 9.5 looks better still.

Installation

Opera 9.5 Beta 2 is a 4.4MB download on Windows, a surprisingly small file size considering the plethora of features that Opera has to offer (in comparison, Firefox 3 Beta 5 is a 7.2MB download, and Safari comes in at 18.7MB). The installer is short and sweet—earlier versions of Opera exhibited occasional pixelation in the clipart models of happy people who graced the various screens, but this new version simply has a placeholder graphic:





The browser installs in a separate directory from 9.0, allowing users to test out the beta while still running the current released version (9.27 at the time of this writing) at the same time. The beta can be uninstalled at any point while still leaving 9.0—including any customizations and enhancements—untouched.

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!

New features





User interface enhancements abound in Opera 9.5. For starters, there is a toggle on the bottom right of the status bar to show images or view only cached images, which can speed up loading of often-viewed sites in some cases. There is also a control on the status bar to quickly change the zoom mode, which scales up text and smoothly rescales graphic images remarkably quickly. The shortcut keys Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right can now be used on all platforms to substitute for Back and Forward.

There are some new configurable options, such as the ability to set the behavior when closing a tab to switch to the last active tab, the next tab, or the tab that originally opened the tab being closed. The Sync feature, which imports bookmarks and Speed Dial between computers and mobile devices, has been improved and now includes "Notes", a neat feature where users can add personal notes to any text field on a web page.

The often-neglected Mail component of Opera has been significantly upgraded, with multithreaded background searching, automatic saving of message drafts, and improved message filtering.

A future for Opera?

Opera has always proved the naysayers wrong by surviving even when many pundits didn't give it a chance. However, the folks at Opera Software ASA have to be wondering just what it will take for their browser to ever exceed the tiny 1 percent market share that it has held steadily for many years. Much of the company's efforts in recent years have been aimed at the mobile market, and Opera has found great success on the Nintendo DS and Wii, and on Windows Mobile devices. One wonders, however, if development of the desktop version hasn't suffered in the meantime.

For my part, I have found that Opera suffices for all my browsing needs, although I have found it somewhat worrying that some new "Web 2.0" sites may wind up not being fully supported on Opera. While Opera is running neck and neck with its competitors to pass web standards tests such as Acid3, and any site that works on Firefox tends to work just fine on Opera, the fact is that as web sites get more complicated, there are more opportunities for sites to exhibit weird bugs and behaviors. Most site authors only test on Firefox and IE, so any issues with Opera are up to Opera to fix.

The other issue that Opera has is that its extensibility is relatively limited compared to Firefox, which has grown a large community of extensions that scratch every conceivable itch. For example, there is an extension called Showcase Sidebar that will display thumbnails of all open tabs on the left-hand side of the screen, and one called It's Just Text that adds a formerly Amiga-only feature of letting the user edit form text in any editor or word processor. Other features that Opera pioneered, like Speed Dial, have been quickly copied by the extension community. These extensions are hugely useful, and have helped Firefox's popularity grow. Opera might want to consider opening up the browser to user-added extensions in the future.