Brett_Tabke - 1:59 pm on Feb 13, 2010 (gmt 0)

lol Fotiman - those tests were by Google and WebKit and reported by Mozilla fan site cnet. Ya think they are a bit biased? lol

Here - a slower version of the Opera 10.5 Alpha that smoked FF and IE for lunch from an independent 3rd party:
[betanews.com...]

But with a score of 24.43 in our latest Windows 7 tests, the Opera 10.5 pre-alpha renders, crunches, and expedites content 17.7 times faster than IE8. We expect that number to decline a bit as Opera Software fixes this browser to at least "alpha" quality. Yet with a two-point gap over Chrome 5, Opera can actually afford to take it down a notch -- something we never thought we'd be saying just four months ago.

[lifehacker.com...]

What does Opera 10.5 have to offer? If a quick test is any indication, faster JavaScript speed than any browser out there.

In my real world tests, there is simply no question that Opera does - and always has - blown the doors off IE and Firefox in real world surfing. Chrome - I don't know about - as it is so far behind in features, I don't think it is a serious or fair comparison to use it.

All-in-all, it is clearly Opera's best effort to date.

> 10.5

I have been using the various Alphas since before christmas and it is quite a bit better in most regards.

However, I don't care for the new page search routine - horrible beyond description. It pretty much ends the ability to search the page. It changes the whole page color and shifts it downward a row. This is clearly a weekend hack feature.

They also switched away from the classic MDI windows driven windows to modual dialog boxes. You lose minimize and close buttons from windows. There are workarounds, but it requires you to adjust to the browser instead of the browser to the person.

Either way, I am still trying to use Firefox as much as I can tolerate. FF is ok at rendering speed, but the rest of the user interface is so slow it is really annoying. I mostly do alot of trying to close windows because they appear broken they are so slow. FF also doesn't have alot of the nice features of Opera (like shift-click-form buttons). Probably my biggest beef with FF is that it takes days to install all the necc goodies we really want. While Opera can be copied from machine to machine in a few meg, FF has to be reinstalled on each machine and then each addon has to be found. ugh. So, it too requires you to adapt (slow down) to use it.