Opera 10.5 [Download] - Fastest Browser

Thursday, February 11th, 2010 | #Tags: benchmark, Browsers, opera

A month after the preview of Opera 10.5 alpha, and Beta, comes the Stable 10.5 for windows.

Opera claims it’s latest offering, Opera 10.5 Stable, to be the fastest Browser on Earth for Windows. But the same is true for every platform.

Update: Opera 10.5 Stable for Windows Released at Opera.com

Here is the summary of stuff that’s new with Opera 10.5. Official benchmarks Opera revealed a while ago:

But Opera didn’t Compare the SunSpider results to Chrome 5, which is the fastest browser. So we decided to do our own benchmark, and the results were surprising. And the Winner is:

TEST                   COMPARISON            FROM                 TO             DETAILS
=============================================================================
** TOTAL **:           1.29x as fast     1649.8ms +/- 2.1%   1276.2ms +/- 2.3%     significant
=============================================================================
  3d:                  1.58x as fast      259.8ms +/- 4.7%    164.0ms +/- 6.6%     significant
    cube:              1.86x as fast       93.6ms +/- 6.3%     50.4ms +/- 6.4%     significant
    morph:             1.77x as fast       97.6ms +/- 4.6%     55.2ms +/- 2.5%     significant
    raytrace:          -                   68.6ms +/- 13.8%     58.4ms +/- 15.1%
  access:              1.35x as fast      191.0ms +/- 4.1%    141.2ms +/- 2.6%     significant
    binary-trees:      *1.38x as slow*     12.2ms +/- 36.3%     16.8ms +/- 3.3%     significant
    fannkuch:          1.12x as fast       76.8ms +/- 7.4%     68.6ms +/- 1.6%     significant
    nbody:             2.07x as fast       77.8ms +/- 6.5%     37.6ms +/- 12.3%     significant
    nsieve:            1.33x as fast       24.2ms +/- 12.3%     18.2ms +/- 3.1%     significant
  bitops:              3.51x as fast      175.6ms +/- 7.1%     50.0ms +/- 9.1%     significant
    3bit-bits-in-byte: 3.12x as fast       20.6ms +/- 6.9%      6.6ms +/- 10.3%     significant
    bits-in-byte:      4.38x as fast       36.8ms +/- 4.4%      8.4ms +/- 8.1%     significant
    bitwise-and:       7.23x as fast       56.4ms +/- 11.9%      7.8ms +/- 7.1%     significant
 --Truncated for Brevity ---

The Result: Opera 10.5 is blazing fast. It’s 29% Faster than Google Chrome 5.

Update: Opera 10.5 Stable on Windows is 7% faster than Beta. Damn, Chrome is way behind

What’s New:

1. Performance — Vega Graphics, Carkan & Presto: The 3 secret power components.

Opera’s SVG library now becomes throttled engine for Opera’s graphics throughout. This would bring Graphics acceleration based on GPU like IE9 (Internet explorer 9), in future.

The Speed difference can be felt easily. In benchmarks, it’s alot faster than Firefox and even beats that of Chrome 5.

The faster rendering secret is the newer rendering engine (Presto 2.5.x). Long anticipated Carakan is here to do it’s fast Javascript execution. It’s more than 10x faster in SunSpider than Opera 10.10 with Futhark on Windows (Mac optimization is not as far along).

2. Better search

Whether it’s web search or searching inside the page, its better than before.

3. Better UI – More Glass

Inbuilt page search, web search, URL bar, tab stacking sidebar, have been modified for easier and snappier navigation.

4. Full Windows 7 Integration
Opera 10.5 takes full advantage ofWindows 7’s Superbar. By default, the jump list displays your Speed Dial pages. What’s more is that you can pin pages as well, though right now it only works with Speed Dial items — so pinning isn’t all that useful just yet.

Per-tab thumbnails, on the other hand, work beautifully.

5. HTML5: After Firefox and Chrome, Opera 10.5 finally supports HTML5 natively. It uses an updated rendering engine known as Presto. Presto 2.5 brings new HTML5 features including support for CSS3 Transitions.

6. Per-tab private browsing: It’s pretty similar to what we’ve seen with other browsers: browsing and download history are not saved. Everything which happened in the tab is forgotten about as soon as you close it. One big plus is that you don’t need to open an additional window, making Opera’s implementation just a little bit more inconspicuous.