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If you go by conventional thinking Internet Explorer 8 is the slowest of the current web browsers, followed by Opera, with Firefox in third place, Safari taking the silver and Google Chrome leaping ahead in first. Time for a rethink.
Opera has announced v10.5 of its browser this week in an ‘alpha’ format (read: this isn’t even beta yet, casual users stay away). Despite this, however, it represents a potential game changing update for the company.
According to the respected benchmark of suites run by specialist site betanews.com Opera 10.5 not only boosts the speed of its web browsing performance, but jet propels it to speeds in excess of anything we’ve even seen from the beta and developer versions of Chrome.
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To put this into some context Betanews uses a benchmark whereby the speed of Internet Explorer 7 is classed as 1.0 using Windows 7 making all other browsers results relative to this. Consequently, IE8 scores 1.55, Opera 10.2 5.85, Firefox 3.5 11.12 (3.7 alpha 13.29), Safari 4 20.83, Chrome 22.5 and Opera 10.5 24.5.
This is a monstrous turnaround and is also backed up by a stylish redesign of the interface which makes us think why oh why has Opera not classified this v11.0. Where more stable versions of Opera 10.5 can go from here, nobody knows!
So Opera 10.5 represents a real twist in the tale. How will other browser developers respond? Well, can only rub our hands with glee at the prospect of finding out…
Opera 10.5 can be downloaded here
http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/12/22/