Can Opera 10 Take the Cake Away from Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome? - A Study

If there is one place where the competition is really and I mean REALLY hot, then its the battle between the browsers. Not so long ago, Opera and Firefox used to compete with each other to get to the second spot to that of IE. Now the whole scenario has changed as Opera has lagged behind significantly. To reclaim the lost market, Opera has tried to improve on its v10. What are they? Should we really think of Opera as a serious alternative to Mozilla Firefox? Let me take you through.

What about Speed?

This is the foremost concern of any user about the browser he/ she is running. Opera boasts of a significant 30% boost of speed in Opera 10 Alpha. To do a recheck, we ran an Acid3 web standards test which had a perfect score. The page loads quick and fast.

Comparative Test with Firefox

Download.com went a bit more and found out that the browser is three times faster than the current stable release, with the SunSpider Java test clocking in at 5,740.8 milliseconds. That compares very favorably to Opera 9.62, which I benchmarked at 15,468.8 ms, but is still slower than the Firefox 3.1 beta. Mozilla’s latest developer build zips in at 2,787.6 ms when running its new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

InLine Spell Check

At last Opera developers have paid heed to the most missed feature of Opera. The in-line spell check. Firefox had it from 2006, Google Chrome has it right from the beginning. I don’t know why Opera wasn’t ready to do this tiny bit of extension to their browser software but at last, they did. If you are an Opera lover then I know, you must be thrilled. But is it too little, too late Opera?

e- Mailing Options

Opera Mail, meanwhile, now supports either full HTML formatting or plaintext in e-mails. Yes another basic feature which Opera developers didn’t care to implement with a God-knows-why reluctance. But it is now. So don’t scratch your head while seeing those e- cards.

What is There for Developers?

The majority of the changes in this Opera alpha release are aimed at developers. The average user will rarely get to use them as if knowingly. It has further support for CSS3. The others include

• Sourcing fonts
• Transparency rendering
• Animation framerates
• Developers will be happy to see that Dragonfly—Opera’s built-in tool for debugging web sites, similar to the Firebug extension in Firefox—has been updated with more and better features.
• You can also use the DOM inspector to determine the source of traffic, useful for Ajax debugging, and the ability to edit attributes in real-time.
• Improved HTTP header inspection

Automatic Updates

Automatic updates are now here in Opera 10 alpha. You can use it to keep your browser up-to-date. But as you can figure out, you won’t have control over your applications and plugins within Opera. They can upgrade or update or even stop it. Remember Apple’s update monitor and Windows’ automatic updates?

If you’d like to tweak your update settings,

• Go to Tools -> Preferences
• Choose the Advanced tab on the right and then Security from the list of options.
• The Opera update drop-down menu allows you to change the default to Don’t check for updates or Automatic updates.

Stability?

We tried and tested Opera 10 alpha knowing that its an alpha release which can and must have a bug or two, knowing that it can crash but surprisingly it didn’t. It is really a stable release by all means and I hope with time the final release, which is scheduled at the later part of this year, will surely worth a long try.

Conclusion

I have seen many people who just love Opera. Despite having a poor market share and nothing much to choose from all the versions of previous years, Opera has a community and dev support. Let’s see how they get benefited from this new and significantly enriched version of Opera. For me, I will stick to Firefox and keep it as a standby for now. But unless Opera starts making progress on its extensions and widgets, this is gonna be a tough race for them to improve and capture from the likes of Firefox and Chrome.

What do you think? Write to us.

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[Pic Source: lifehacker.com]