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Poll: Do you use Opera (the browser)?

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Re: Poll: Do you use Opera (the browser)?

#61

Post by simonsarris »

pornel wrote: post #38
simonsarris wrote: post #16

I only use it for testing. It is easily the worst browser with respect to Canvas performance. It is almost always an order of magnitude slower than IE9, FF5, and Chrome 14.

> It is easily the worst browser with respect to Canvas performance. I thought so too, until I added Math.floor(x) to positions in drawImage(). When you give fractional positions, Opera takes it literally and does rendering with costly anti-aliasing for subpixel precision. Once I rounded the numbers, Opera turned out to be the fastest.

I actually made tests a while ago to show precisely those two things, namely flooring and drawImage, are 10x as slow on Opera.

First let me note that on average using Math.floor(x) results in slower performance than using x | 0. I'd recommend using the latter way instead.

And even then Opera is an order of magnitude slower at flooring numbers compared to FF5, IE9 and Chrome 14:

http://jsperf.com/bit-thingies

Opera's drawImage is also an order of magnitude slower than Chrome 14, IE9 and FF5. Note that in this link the FF8Beta, Ipad, and the first two Chrome versions were ran by someone else's machine, so those results can't be compared with the other numbers.

http://jsperf.com/render-vs-prerender

If you don't believe them, of course, I urge you to run them for yourself.

Re: Poll: Do you use Opera (the browser)?

#63

Post by nathanb »

ks wrote: post #60
nathanb wrote: post #50

I tried to get into Opera Mini. I liked it because it is speedier than the stock Android browser, it handles tabs well, and the interface does pretty much what I expect most of the time. But I found that on a weak wireless signal it would just give up on loading the page, and its startup time was just enough to make it cumbersome. It has since been removed from my phone.

You could try Opera Mobile instead. That's a more traditional browser and may perform better.

IMO the fact that Opera Mini doesn't try to grab a GPS signal and integrate itself with my phone is a feature.

Re: Poll: Do you use Opera (the browser)?

#64

Post by snes »

microtonal wrote: post #52

I used Opera, when it still was paid-for software, because it was light and fast. I left Opera when they started including everything but the kitchen sink (Mail client, etc.) in the browser. I never quite understood why they did not release the applications separately. They probably wanted to compete with the Mozilla suite.

At the time when such mattered to the single core sub ghz cpu. The binary for Opera was still smaller then Firefox's. And if you didn't enable the mail client, it wasn't enabled. What is bloat, is having an entire browser in an emailclient to render HTML messages, like Mozilla did.

Re: Poll: Do you use Opera (the browser)?

#65

Post by eperoumal »

micheljansen wrote: post #53
skrebbel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's a shame that they seem to be always running behind on standards compliance, causing all kinds of problems in daily usage. It feels a bit to me like you're reiterating a myth. I've used opera for 5 years and I've never run into this, afair. I virtually only get problems when devs use browser detection and then tell me that "this site does not work on opera". I've also had problems with sites that were just only…

You may be right. Like I said, it has been a while since I last used Opera (several years) and then there were many instances where I had to switch to other browsers to be able to proceed. Most annoyingly, my online banking would work in Firefox (and I'm sure in IE), but not in Opera. These things made it very annoying for daily use. Maybe it is not fair to blame Opera for quirks and deviations from standards any mor…

I have used Opera a few times, and at the time I was using it, there was no support for SOCKS proxies (something standard in other competitors, always cool to set up a poor's man VPN over SSH). By then, it was important for me to have this in my browser, so I dropped Opera and chose Chrome instead. Nevertheless, I checked the last version and it seems like they implemented SOCKS. Great news, but for now I'll stick to Chrome... BTW, is there any killer feature in Opera ?

Re: Poll: Do you use Opera (the browser)?

#66

Post by pornel »

simonsarris wrote: post #61
pornel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is easily the worst browser with respect to Canvas performance. I thought so too, until I added Math.floor(x) to positions in drawImage(). When you give fractional positions, Opera takes it literally and does rendering with costly anti-aliasing for subpixel precision. Once I rounded the numbers, Opera turned out to be the fastest.

I actually made tests a while ago to show precisely those two things, namely flooring and drawImage, are 10x as slow on Opera. First let me note that on average using Math.floor(x) results in slower performance than using x | 0. I'd recommend using the latter way instead. And even then Opera is an order of magnitude slower at flooring numbers compared to FF5, IE9 and Chrome 14: http://jsperf.com/bit-thingies Opera's…

I stand corrected. Chrome has gotten really fast since worked with canvas (last year).

Re: Poll: Do you use Opera (the browser)?

#67

Post by Khao »

prumek wrote: post #56
Khao wrote: post #2

I don't use Opera and I never test it because the user base is not big enough to matter. My experience with Opera has always resulted in broken websites because of their poor rendering engine (in my opinion). I still can't believe the Opera browser has existed from the beginning of browsers and still exists today and their market share hasn't really gone up significantly.

> their poor rendering engine That's an rather misleading and ignorant thing to say.

Hence why I added (in my opinion) right after. What's misleading and ignorant in stating an opinion? I didn't state that as a fact. For the few times where I had to fix things in Opera (can't remember which version it was but it's no more than 2-3 years ago) the rendering was really off compared to FF, Chrome and even IE.

Re: Poll: Do you use Opera (the browser)?

#68

Post by markokocic »

miketaylr wrote: post #54
markokocic wrote: post #42

I was not able to use Opera at work for years because of lack of socks proxy support. With each release I would download Opera, install it, check that it still doesn't have socks support and gave up. Using SocksCap or FreeCap for that was just annoying. After some time I stopped caring about Opera. Now, I don't even bother to test on it.

It does have socks proxy support now, just FYI.

Glad that they finally added it.

If it was available ~8 years ago I might have been using Opera.

Does it have proxy pac file support also?

Re: Poll: Do you use Opera (the browser)?

#69

Post by pornel »

eperoumal wrote: post #65
micheljansen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be right. Like I said, it has been a while since I last used Opera (several years) and then there were many instances where I had to switch to other browsers to be able to proceed. Most annoyingly, my online banking would work in Firefox (and I'm sure in IE), but not in Opera. These things made it very annoying for daily use. Maybe it is not fair to blame Opera for quirks and deviations from standards any mor…

I have used Opera a few times, and at the time I was using it, there was no support for SOCKS proxies (something standard in other competitors, always cool to set up a poor's man VPN over SSH). By then, it was important for me to have this in my browser, so I dropped Opera and chose Chrome instead. Nevertheless, I checked the last version and it seems like they implemented SOCKS. Great news, but for now I'll stick to…

Opera's killer features get copied sooner or later (sessions, DOM cache, speed dial, undo close tab, etc.) And what is a killer depends what you care about…

• It's very good if you prefer using keyboard navigation (spatial navigation is a killer not copied anywhere yet)

• Mouse Gestures are still best implemented in Opera IMHO, although Apple's trackpad gestures make that less of a killer feature these days.

• (Fast)Forward button finds and "clicks" on links with labels like "Next page" which makes paged navigation easy.

• Opera handles lots of tabs in a session very well. I often leave tabs open instead of bookmarking pages :)

• The built-in mail client is a killer for me – has "GMail-like" filters (predating GMail), very good threading, 1-key shortcuts and differentiates between "seen" and "read".

Re: Poll: Do you use Opera (the browser)?

#70

Post by pornel »

microtonal wrote: post #52

I used Opera, when it still was paid-for software, because it was light and fast. I left Opera when they started including everything but the kitchen sink (Mail client, etc.) in the browser. I never quite understood why they did not release the applications separately. They probably wanted to compete with the Mozilla suite.

Paid-for version had mail client too. v6 even had ICQ client.

Since then Opera has been hiding these features, but they're not separating them, as they have no noticeable impact and the codebase as a whole is still smaller than less featured competitors'.

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