Steve is right... and Roland, if you disable all JS, plugins, etc, you will find it goes much faster!!
The thing that slows it down, is badly written JS, flash etc, to say nothing about huge unnecessary scripts just to start(a link is enough??) and manage
that plugin!!! (Just fancy decoration!)

And if you use the registry hacks to optimize your internet, you may well find it faster again!!

Opera USED to be a great browser, with very versatile features, that made surfing and researching a pleasure.. They have removed most of these, and just NOT developed the rest, for FF to implement and greatly improve on them..

@molecule-eyes That is not true for the 10.5x and upwards. It has been rewritten to use the framework available; Qt, GTK or native X.

http://my.opera.com/ruario/blog/unix-10-50-evenes-work-in-progress

Browser speed most definitely matters. Especially when it comes to javascript.

I develop websites for my company and we started using a JS library that on IE 6 would bring select (huge) pages on our site to a crawl. Literally it would take over a minute to load the page because the JS traverses the DOM and IE is simply horrible at that.

Same situation in IE 7 reduced the time drastically, but still slow. Firefox and Chrome would load the page in < 3 seconds (including fetching the html) whereas IE 7 was taking 15 seconds.

It's those types of speed increases that matter (IE vs FF/Chrome). But I will concede that going from 15 ms to 6 ms doesn't mean much, that is unless you have tons of those situations running on a single page. If user actions are realized quick enough, it makes no difference if those are further reduced.

Opera's got such an ugly interface on most linux desktop environments that I fear nobody would care to even imagine it let alone use it. I suppose the shift to Qt may have caused this, if I recall correctly.

I'm glad they only claimed to be the fastest in the world, because you really never know what sort of browsers aliens are developing in other quadrants of the galaxy, universe, multiverse or pluriverse. They're probably quite fast, quite fast indeed.

...and yes it's (yet again) faster and looks great on W7. For such a small company they have incredible impact on the market (given they basically came up with all the decent browser innovations we all take for granted today). Opera is my prime choice for older machines too - it's markedly faster at startup and general use than FF.

Choice is good :)

you're absolutely right, Slava, they even have this condescending attitude towards people who report bugs repeatedly with each new version (they call them "pet bugs") - I mean those suckers actually see that there is an issue but they keep ignoring it in all new versions, it's disheartening. But they are reaping what they sow, especially with market share at about 1 percent or so. The worst thing however is that they keep adding new features after beta, how lame. I mean totally lame, instead of quality product you get a software full of bugs and features not working right.

Opera team has an issue you will never find in such disproportion anywhere else. It's literally zero quality control. Try also tell them about bugs...hopefully, they will not delete messages from TheInq site. Anyways, if somebody needs ver.10.10 which somehow works let me know :-/

As a developer developing an application suite in JS, believe me now that browsers are able to handle JS at these speeds more and more complicated and extremely useful applications can be developed. These browsers are creating a very important foundation and it will be a while until you see the fruits of it all.

Its like when new versions of DirectX come out, it takes a few years for the install base to build to the point it can be taken advantage of.

I don't totally agree with you. Efficient code has its uses. Improving hardware can sometimes speed things up but with increase in cost and power usage.

Having efficient code does not have draw backs in the end user.

If the code is vastly efficient, in extreme cases, scaling hardware would not scale the performance. This is especially true if software is interpreter limited which requires emulated software layers. Javascript is an interpreted language.

Last but not least, I have personally experienced with Firefox slowing down, mainly due to memory leakage, PDF and flash, when I was doing research and had over 30tabs open. Now my computer has 4GB of RAM, 2.7Ghz Quad Core. Improving hardware is not the answer.

Used Opera until this 10.5x release. Check their forums for the issues (ignore the condescension). Speed is useless if functionality is impeded by freeze ups, resource issues etc. I moved on to other browsers and discovered:
a) they are pretty good at what they do
b) "fastest" in real terms is relative
c) IE isn't in the equation

If you think your browser is slow then you probably need a faster computer, not a faster browser.

Since when has browser speed been a concern in the last half decade? Sure, *connection* speeds, but the *browser* speeds? I can't recall ever being browser-speed limited; that may have been a concern back in the late 1990s. Now? Who cares?

Whilst also providing a link to the 10.60 beta.

Maybe they mean 10.53 WAS "the fastest browser ever", not "is".

What do they use on the International Space Station, because apparently its speed around the earth is about 28,000 km/h.

Microsoft already claimed IE9 was the fastest. Covered in an inq article around a week ago. Read your colleagues work!