NOTICE! – This is rather old, check out this post for Opera 10 Final information.

The latest edition of Opera was announced on December 3rd and I decided to take it for a test drive after seeing that it had aced the infamous Acid 3 browser compliance test.

Frankly, I was initially disappointed at it’s apparent speed, though I suppose that the way the engine loads pages is more or less linear compared to Firefox. I must be used to Firefox’s way of doing things, though the cosmetic issue quickly faded. After a while, I was quite used to it, and then the clear differences of the new Presto (WebKit based) rendering engine really started to shine.

One of the first things I did was look for widgets to load multiple links the way a Firefox addon such as Linky would so I could do my Entrecard drops as sort of a torture test. Loading 50+ tabs in Firefox 3.0.4 is an easy way to drain your system resources in a hurry. Addons such as Adblock and Noscript tend to help alleviate this drain to a degree, but you’ll still run out of RAM if you push it too hard.

Once I turned off Java, Plugins, Music, and etc via the Tools menu (yup, FF users, no addons needed) multiple page loads really seemed to fly. JS widgets that were used by multiple sites (such as the EC widget) seemed to load instantly and I was able to complete my 300 page loads in roughly half the time it would have taken for FF 3.0.4. Overall memory usage seemed about the same, but due to the dynamic nature of the pages I loaded, there was nothing quite scientific about the results.

With every new browser comes a landslide of benchmarks and really accurate data concerning page loads, compliance, and Javascript precompiling performance, but the real test of a good browser will always be security first, and the “look and feel”. Opera 10a’s changelog doesn’t seem to focus on the security aspect (all filed under Misc.) so much as the latter, but I guess that’s always been their niche anyway.

Other exciting stuff
CSS3 RGBA colors
Dragonfly
Web Fonts and SVG
30% Faster (than a non-webkit browser?)

Not so exciting… Playing catch up with the big boys
Inline spell-check
Auto-update
HTML formatting in Opera Mail

Quirks
Load a bunch of tabs, then run Solitaire. Minimize Opera and enjoy seizure.

Predictions
With Opera 10′s final release coming mid-2009, it seems that Firefox and IE will be alone at the top with everyone else using WebKit based engines. I have a strong feeling that by the time IE hits 9 it will have adopted WebKit as well, possibly leaving Firefox completely obsolete with fan boys attached to it like kids are to their NES… On second thought, that is probably just as likely as IE adopting Tracemonkey… But still more likely that the Twilight Zone possibility that Microsoft will shock the world with their own proprietary Precompiles-teh-entire-web engine with 9000 times faster benchmarks and rock solid standards, security, and stability. Who knows… I do know that I wrote this post in Firefox.