Now I really do love Google Chrome and I use it all the time as my primary browser. Why do I use it so much? Well it’s fast, very fast, it launches in a second and is over all very clean and reliable. Well recently Opera software, who were very much responsible for the introduction of the browser ballot screen, has released Opera 10.5 for Windows, boasting that it’s “the fastest browser on Earth.”
The main focus for Opera 10.5 is speed, and much of the speed comes from two new under the hood features in this release, namely the new Carakan JavaScript rendering engine and the Vega graphics engine
So I decided to put it to the test, and well, Google Chrome still beat it for me anyway. It easily beats Firefox and Internet Explorer but it just can’t beat Chrome. Even with a couple of Chrome extensions installed it still launches fractionally faster than Opera and loads pages just as fast.
But Opera has got something that I wish Google Chrome would have, and that is support for access to individual open tabs. Internet Explorer has this as well as a few other applications, but not many that I use often.
I don’t know why Google and many other software companies haven’t got onto this sooner as it’s a great feature and I love it.
Opera has also added its “Speed Dial” to the jump list from the task bar. These are a list of sites which you can quickly launch.
Opera also has a nice feature called “Opera Turbo” which loads web pages much faster. What it does is compress the webpages on Opera’s servers before sending it on to your PC. While this means faster load times, it also means that picture quality is reduced and I’ve found that some sites like my own and this one don’t work very well with this feature on. It also limits functionality and security since it doesn’t allow Https connections.
In addition to the Windows 7 integration, Opera 10.5 sports a somewhat different look on Windows, having eliminated the traditional menu bar in favor a new “Opera menu,” which looks and behaves much like the single button menus found in Microsoft Office.
For now Opera is just available for Windows as the Mac and Linux versions still remain in Beta. You can download Opera 10.5 from here
What do you think of Opera 10.5?
Let us know in the comments
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