Opera today released a new version of its browser, which arrives with
less features than originally promised. We especially miss hardware
acceleration, which, however, will most likely be worth the wait when it
will be added later on. We had the chance to take Opera 11 through our
four standard JavaScript benchmarks on our two hardware platforms to
see if there was any performance improvement and what new features you
can expect.
Opera built considerable expectations when it announced Opera 11 a few weeks ago. Of course, there was a good reason for beating the PR drums. For the first time I can remember, Opera is falling behind in the browser speed race, not just behind Chrome, but also behind IE9 and Firefox. Some trendy features like hardware acceleration are missing (even if Opera has arguably the most advanced software acceleration backend in browsers today) and that just does not sit too well with users in a time when they are willing to switch their browsers almost on a daily basis and use certain browsers for very specific tasks.
The stakes are high in this cut-throat market, in which innovation speed counts. We had a first look at the final version and prepped a JavaScript test run on our 6-core Phenom II X6 PC as well as our new Gateway NV95C notebook with a dual-core i3-300M CPU. We benchmarked it against the latest Chromium nightly build, version 10.0.614.0, which includes an improved Crankshaft and is the fastest JavaScript browser you can use today. So it’s not a fair comparison, but it provides a good idea where Opera 11 currently stands.
In Sunspider, Opera 11 is just slightly behind Chrome as well as IE9 Beta. It is about 5% faster than Opera 10.71 on our 6-core system, where the browser posted a performance of 273 ms. There is not much room in performance improvements left and the differences between the leading browsers are negligible.
In Kraken, Chrome 10 can shine with its Crankshaft engine and is substantially faster than any other browser. Opera 11 is slightly faster than its predecessor, which we clocked in at 14,256 ms.
V8 has been Google’s territory, but Opera remains the second fastest browser in this discipline – even if it is far behind Chrome. Opera 10.71 posted a score of 3275.
No surprises as far as Google is concerned in Celtic Kane, but we were surprised to see the notebook run Opera faster through this parcours than the hexa-core system.
Beyond the numbers
We will run a complete benchmark test with all 245 tests over the weekend, but we already get a feeling that there is not much to report in terms of performance for Opera. This browser is more about its stacked tabs, which follows a trend where browser developers are trying to find ways to organize a flood of tabs in the same window. Stacking is not as disruptive as Mozilla’s Panorama, for example, and may be a more comfortable solution for some users. Then there are refreshed mouse gestures in opera 11, which I am personally not a friend of, but I hear that there are many users who actually like to use mouse movements as shortcuts.
The big news about Opera 11 is the lacking hardware acceleration, which isn’t a big deal today (other than a marketing problem), since there are very few sites that take advantage of hardware acceleration anyway.
What makes Opera’s decision interesting is the fact that the company promises to bring hardware acceleration to all platforms and not just Windows Vista and Windows 7. Mozilla has talked about such an approach recently, but said that it is a lot of work to come up with a working solution to run hardware acceleration under Windows XP. If Opera can make it work, then Opera 11 is without doubt the most attractive browser for Windows XP, which still owns about half of the global installed base of operating systems.
Opera built considerable expectations when it announced Opera 11 a few weeks ago. Of course, there was a good reason for beating the PR drums. For the first time I can remember, Opera is falling behind in the browser speed race, not just behind Chrome, but also behind IE9 and Firefox. Some trendy features like hardware acceleration are missing (even if Opera has arguably the most advanced software acceleration backend in browsers today) and that just does not sit too well with users in a time when they are willing to switch their browsers almost on a daily basis and use certain browsers for very specific tasks.
The stakes are high in this cut-throat market, in which innovation speed counts. We had a first look at the final version and prepped a JavaScript test run on our 6-core Phenom II X6 PC as well as our new Gateway NV95C notebook with a dual-core i3-300M CPU. We benchmarked it against the latest Chromium nightly build, version 10.0.614.0, which includes an improved Crankshaft and is the fastest JavaScript browser you can use today. So it’s not a fair comparison, but it provides a good idea where Opera 11 currently stands.
In Sunspider, Opera 11 is just slightly behind Chrome as well as IE9 Beta. It is about 5% faster than Opera 10.71 on our 6-core system, where the browser posted a performance of 273 ms. There is not much room in performance improvements left and the differences between the leading browsers are negligible.
In Kraken, Chrome 10 can shine with its Crankshaft engine and is substantially faster than any other browser. Opera 11 is slightly faster than its predecessor, which we clocked in at 14,256 ms.
V8 has been Google’s territory, but Opera remains the second fastest browser in this discipline – even if it is far behind Chrome. Opera 10.71 posted a score of 3275.
No surprises as far as Google is concerned in Celtic Kane, but we were surprised to see the notebook run Opera faster through this parcours than the hexa-core system.
Beyond the numbers
We will run a complete benchmark test with all 245 tests over the weekend, but we already get a feeling that there is not much to report in terms of performance for Opera. This browser is more about its stacked tabs, which follows a trend where browser developers are trying to find ways to organize a flood of tabs in the same window. Stacking is not as disruptive as Mozilla’s Panorama, for example, and may be a more comfortable solution for some users. Then there are refreshed mouse gestures in opera 11, which I am personally not a friend of, but I hear that there are many users who actually like to use mouse movements as shortcuts.
The big news about Opera 11 is the lacking hardware acceleration, which isn’t a big deal today (other than a marketing problem), since there are very few sites that take advantage of hardware acceleration anyway.
What makes Opera’s decision interesting is the fact that the company promises to bring hardware acceleration to all platforms and not just Windows Vista and Windows 7. Mozilla has talked about such an approach recently, but said that it is a lot of work to come up with a working solution to run hardware acceleration under Windows XP. If Opera can make it work, then Opera 11 is without doubt the most attractive browser for Windows XP, which still owns about half of the global installed base of operating systems.
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