The “Break it Down” Blog

I saw the Opera 9.5 Alpha (Kestrel) announcements recently like a lot of you and having used Opera in the past didn’t think much of it. Don’t get me wrong, Opera has always been an almost-great browser to me, but never fantastic.

Anyway I decided to cave in and give it a try after looking at some indepth performance numbers from this Alpha release compared to production releases of IE and Firefox. To make a long-story short if you don’t want to read through all the charts… Opera 9.5 is shaping up to be insanely fast and Firefox is a pile of memory-hungry shit. For any long-time Firefox users out there, the “memory-hungry shit” part is likely not a surprise…

Anyway I installed Opera 9.5 and started using it for a day to completely my daily tasks, and here are my thoughts:

• Fast… no seriously, FAST. This is a browser developed to be insanely competative. Back is instant, page loads (atleast the ones I read) are on average 2x faster than firefox.
• FAST, incase you weren’t paying attention to the point above, I’m not kidding here. Google Maps, comparing the same map in Firefox and the same map in Opera 9.5 is a totally different story. The segment loads in Opera are so quick you normally don’t see them and it’s a completely fluid scrolling experience.
• Memory usage is fantastic, even loading huge pages or media-hungry pages the memory sits at a meager 80MB while Firefox is happily pounding it’s feet towards 620MB with the same load. That’s some great open-source programming!
• It’s Safari-esque… the wizardey form autocomplete stuff reminds me of Safari, it’s good at guessing what you want and filling it all in. Very nice.
• New platform Look and Feels are accurate and fast
• Subscribing to feeds is dead-easy and I like the email-esque interface available from inside the browser.
• GMail, Google Maps and Google Calendar all work fine
• Google Docs still gives an “incompatible” error message, but if you use the workaround of setting the browserok argument to true, the Docs/Spreadsheet apps seem to load and work just fine.
• I miss my AdBlock plugin from Firefox! (Jesus, I had forgotten how stupidly complex some websites, like Anandtech, are with their ads… pegging my CPU because there are 5 flash ads all running at the same time… what a joke)

Overall I’d rate this Alpha “fantastic” and say with a high level of certainty that I’ll switch when 9.5 final comes out. I wouldn’t mind an ad-blocking plugin though…

Update #1: Hot-damn, Frode pointed out (below) that Opera already includes a built-in ad/content blocker. All you have to do is right-click anywhere in a page and go to “Block Content…” then you are taken to a sort of ’select elements in a page to block’ mode. Once you click the elements you want blocked, they are marked Blocked for you, check it out: