Opera 9.50 - Kestrel
 

Currently Alpha, Kerstrel is meant to improve some of the current lagging issues with Opera. Particularly the performance issues and also adds a support for a lot of important W3C standards.

Benchmarks of the current builds show it to be 50% faster then Opera 8.5 (which is faster then current stable builds of Opera 9.x) I can't tell if it's 50% but it sure damn looks like it's 50% faster. :heh: If not faster...

Change logs: Win Mac Linux

Supposedly the rendering engine has received an overhaul, and a lot of old bugs have been fixes. But, my personal favorites have to be the new Css3 properties, out of which the :nth-child() selector which allows for selecting of every odd element.

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You can get the alpha at: http://snapshot.opera.com/

It will install separately from your current Opera install. There is a known bug where things like the sub-forums here would just display on one big line. (see: change log) I've personally fixed it for this forum with some User Style settings on my end.

You can be reported at: https://bugs.opera.com/wizard/

I've been keeping up with the developer RSS feeds. What I'm most excited about are the changes to the mailer. They haven't really elaborated on it much, with the exception of getting rid of the Opera hanging when an RSS/Mail account is checked. I'm hoping that they can create some new innovations for email, the same way that they've been creating some very useful browser features.

Firefox is the most faster browser, I wonder if Opera will beat firefox with this

That's flamebait right there. I think it really depends on whose benchmarks you're examining, because I've always heard that Opera was the fastest renderer in almost all scenarios.

Not that it really matters, in my opinion. The time that a page takes to load is determined less by your browser and more by your internet connection and processor (my old 1.2 GHz Athlon struggled to load many webpages, oddly enough). I care more that the browser can render the webpages correctly.

Yeah Ledgem, that's what I was thinking too when I first saw it earlier. :rolleyes:
I'm not implying arcadeplayer is some sort of troll, everyone slips some sort of flame-bait now and then; when it happens I think its best to ignore it, or you may drop rocket fuel over it and take it to new heights. ~

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But anyway, since it's started now,
This X browser is faster then Y browser is a no brainer. Over the years there have been hundreds (thousands; if you count the fanboy blogs) of sites with so called "benchmarks" and "proof". And the result... pretty much everyone would just follow the shortest logic leading to their favorite browser as No.1 There are idiot sites out there where people compare, of all things, the browser's official page as "relevent criteria".

What exactly is faster suppose to be anyway!? On connection handling Opera's the best choice for windows (Kestrel's no different ATM), Safari is leading on the Mac front, Ie7 seems to be the choice for Vista and Firefox is leading on Linux boxes. How exactly do you go about comparing something like this; it's so common and yet everyone always ignores the diffrence in OS, like the same code/problems/fixes work the same.

I use Opera and Firefox quite a lot, because of the standards and specifications they use. And, as far as loading pages I think Safari is the fastest. :p Loading pages from my hdd (127.0.0.1) that is.

I'm a long time Opera supporter and I have to say I really don't think the speed matters. I use both Opera and Firefox, and occasionally I use IE7, but to be honest I think they are all quite fast enough. Does anyone here really get upset at the .4 seconds that it takes a page to load? Often enough I'm irritated by speed, but it is the fault of the server's load time being slow, not the browser I'm using. Regardless of Opera, Firefox or IE, they are all close enough that I am just not going to notice the rendering time without a timer. Especially since the limiting factor is usually the server the web pages are on.

While it sounds great to say, "Wow! Opera is even faster!" it just doesn't make any difference to how I experience the web. Am I the only one who feels this way? Speed is just not at the top of my list on things I love about Opera. It's just an egoboo.

Now, the new synchronization feature in Opera 9.5 is awesome. Finally I can have the same set of bookmarks in every location I have a browser. It's nice to bookmark a page at a friend's house or at work and then see it show up in my house. This is really revolutionary. I'd love for this feature to be expanded so that it will include my entire Opera setup. I'd like to synchronize my toobar setup, panels and shortcuts. There are so many custom features that I'd love to have consistent from workstation to workstation. I'd hype synchronizing my skins also, but that might be a bit much for their poor servers.

Well, one thing I noticed about IE7 is that it's a laggy program all around. On most computers I've used, it's taken between 2 and 10 seconds to open a new BLANK tab. That's just bullshit. And I've tested that on about 10 computers ranging from my laptop, my mom's computer, some POS PCs we have at school, my friend's insanely powerful gaming PC, etc.
It should take .01 (I made that up) seconds, like FF and Opera.

Opera and Firefox's actual UI's run about the same for me, and page loading is no different, either.


The biggest reason I refuse to use Opera is because it doesn't render certain sites properly (AFAIK, it won't even load anime suki, you have to use one of the mirrors)...which is reason enough, IMO, to not use a browser.

There's something very wrong with your settings - Opera loads AnimeSuki just fine, at the very least. I've only very rarely run into problems, and half the time it's the fault of the webmaster's crap coding or discriminatory coding ("you're not using a supported browser, you can't come in, your browser won't work"). The latter is usually solved by masking as a different browser, which I then follow up by emailing the web admin and telling them politely that I masked, got in, and it worked, so please allow the browser in. I've done it twice, and both times the page was modified relatively soon thereafter to not give Opera problematic messages.

Actually, on the newest version of Opera, AS is working fine :D.

I just haven't checked it because whatever version they had out 6 months ago didn't work with AS properly.

NSW, .4 of a second difference translates into lag. I think you mean to say .04 . This speed will only show when you're doing work or some intensive activity. Simple browsing doesn't work, you have to multi-task, so it's more like which browser can handle the strain better. As far as I'm concern FF crashes on me when I push it, either that or it lags.

But then again FF wasn't meant to work like that, and neither was Opera. For the general public this difference is irrelevant, just like you said.

Dkong1026, the only difference in the mirrors is that some of them don't have ads. How could it possibly not work in one but work in the other, or visa versa.

I can assure you that AnimeSuki.com has worked just fine in every single version of Opera since I started using Opera with version 7.22. (I've even used most of the beta and weeklies without ever having a problem with AS.) As Ledgem suggests, there must have been something wrong with your settings.

I've had the similar experiences with sites that didn't work quite right in Opera. Twice I had to email a web admin and both times they took care of the problem very quickly after sending me an apologetic email for not properly testing the site in Opera.

That's really odd. Like I said, AS was usually tested BEFORE I changed settings in Opera.

but for whatever reason, it would just never want to load the page. Regardless, problem solved at this point anyways, so whatever.

@NoSanninWa iirc the next FF will have the bookmark synchronization to.

As for me. I got FF/Opera/IE7 installed. I'm using FF most of the time. I can't customize Opera to my liking. The toolbars/buttons just won't get where i want them to be... Though i must say somethings in opera are more interesting. Like the auto form fill thing. But than again... how often do i register somewhere... And Opera starts up faster and uses less ram than FF. I would of seriously consider Opera if i could customize it to act/look like my FF but than with the Opera engine...

Things i like about my FF
Super drag and go, make a drag gesture on link and it opens in new tab, i'm sure opera has such a mouse gesture to. But meh >.< couldn't find it... The fully customized UI of my FF. And the add-ons.

Is it actually possible to customize the interface of Opera to look(look in way like button placement) like this?
http://i150.photobucket.com/albums/s...sc/operaff.jpg
I assume the icons/buttons speak for them self. The button under FILE is new tab... What bugs me the most was that i couldn't get the tab bar in Opera to move down...

Preferences » Advanced » Shortucts » "Tick the Enable Mouse Gestures box at the top"

In your screen, the second icon from the right is the Open in IE tab I think.
There is a plugin to add the functionality to Opera, but like TOR Opera I don't recomend using it, so I won't tell you where to find it.

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This isn't something new, FF has had it for some time. The Speed Dial thing is also from FF, it's just not noticed by the general public I suppose.

ay i sort of need the open in IE to check my mail from school. And some other sites that give compatibility issues in FF.

Your Opera UI looks a lot cleaner and prettier than the standard one. Well now that i know it's possible to get the darn tab bar to move i'll see how far i'll get with Opera when i got some time. Took me several hours to configure my FF including the adblock and cookieblockers.

Actually that's not how I see it, except for the tab bar I guess.
I browse in full screen and either use the ! and @ keys or Ctrl+Tab to switch tabs and enter adresses with F2. (Ocasionally I'll call the adress bar with Ctrl+F8)

As far as the inteface goes, I don't even see the windows one, and neither do I want to.

If you have trouble setting up Opera, see here... http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?t=53164

There's a trick to that actually. You don't move the tab bar. What you do is to delete all buttons on the main bar, then put the buttons from the address bar into the main bar and remove the address bar. Essentially you are creating a new address bar above the tabs instead of moving the tab bar.

You also might want to check out this. It will allow you to make Opera look like this:
http://s02.imagehost.org/1245/opera-firefox-look.jpg

well I surely don't really care much about the little differences in the speed of rendering web pages. I do get the feeling that with Kestrel the pages somewhat loads/renders faster, but that's not something really matters for me.

HOWEVER, there is one key difference between Firefox and Opera that makes me like Opera better, that is, when I open multiple web pages with heavy image/flash contents, Firefox's tab interface tends to freeze and I can't switch between the tabs until the page on top finishes loading. That's very annoying since when I open multiple pages, I want to switch to the ones that finished loading first and read it while the other tabs continues loading the pages in the background. With Opera, I can switch between the tabs at will whether they have finished loading, and I can close some tabs that load too slowly.

This is the case with cleanly installed Firefox, zero add-on, and on multiple PCs ranging from Athlon 650 to Pentium 4 2.0A to Barton 2700+ to Athlon X2 4800+, so I guess it's something in the Firefox's design.

But then I like certain Firefox addons, so I use Opera for power browsing (usually over a dozen tabs open at all time) while Firefox for torbutton, noscript, flashgot, etc. :)

That reminds me of the Ajaxian which recently posted on the problems with web 2.0.

There was a beta, but it sucked. Opera releases weekly builds and the most recent build is the best yet, far better than the beta. It's actually the first not to have any bugs that trouble me. It's also the first build I would recommend to someone for actual use. You can download this preview of Opera 9.5 here. Even if you're not usually comfortable with developer builds, this one is really good and you could leave your regular Opera untouched by installing Kestrel to a new directory so that you can just use it as a preview. (Though you might want to copy over your settings files in case you like it.)

I really love some of 9.5's new features like "synchronize" though I'll admit that the ability to see animated PNGs means very little when there just aren't any on the web yet.