I think there's a world market for maybe five computers - Thomas Watson, IBM
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Opera Software releases Opera 11.10 Barracuda
BROWSER DEVELOPER Opera has released a beta of its Opera 11.10 web browser, codenamed Barracuda.
Opera has been relatively quiet in the past few months, working away on Opera 11.10 with a completely new browser core that the outfit is claiming makes this Opera 11.10 beta the fastest web browser it has ever produced. Despite the reworked underpinnings, Opera is claiming that Barracuda is part of its ongoing evolution.
The major user-facing change that Opera is keen to highlight is the expansion of its Speed Dial feature, which has no usage limits. Opera's Speed Dial allows users to go directly to frequently visited websites. It's a feature that Opera pioneered, with Google having incorporated something similar in its Chrome web browser later on.
Opera also announced that Barracuda has automatic installation of plug-ins, citing the example of Adobe's Flash being installed automatically when you visit a website that requires it.
Background installation of plug-ins, while helpful for many users who want a hassle-free web browsing experience, will hopefully become a thing of the past as HTML5 and CSS3 gain widespread use.
To that end, Opera announced that Barracuda supports CSS3 multi-column layouts and gradients, the Web Open Font Format and Google's WebP image protocol.
Opera might not gather the same mainstream media interest as Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome, however it has a track record to coming up with features that the more widely used browsers pick up down the line.
As Opera is known for supporting the major operating systems, the Opera 11.10 beta release is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
While Opera 11.10 might not have any new killer features, this beta release shows that Opera isn't just standing still while its rivals try to knock seven bells out of each other. µ
Tags: Software
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Default setting for Memory Cache (Preferences, Advanced, History) in Opera is "AUTO" which means that it will use up to 10% of total RAM for caching purposes. That is why Opera eats away a "lot" of memory on systems with few GBs. Purpose of RAM is to be used. Free RAM is wasted RAM.
Opera is not one of those software products that is in eternal beta, like Napster (I think it was Napster, which I didn't use). Please do not use "released" in the headline and then "beta". It is dishonest, and if you, a news site, aren't honest then you're not worth reading.
I have Opera 11.01 on Windows XP with about 100 windows open and no more than 300 MB memory used, so I wonder what I'm doing that you're not. This is on a system that only has 500 MB RAM and that may be something to do with it. I also have plugins ("content") turned off on most web pages, and JavaScript, and usually in-page images cached-only, so it could be that. Or, try minimising the bugger, I think that's designed to release the memory. Or run another hungry program. Or sleep or hibernate the system.
As the downside, lots of fancy web sites haven't ever worked with Opera, or not in their current editions. I can't get Excite Mail to work, for instance. I may be doing something wrong. Excite used to be huge, but then Google came along.
Who cares about 700-800MB of RAM usage? I have purchased my RAM, If it is being used thats a good thing! Is 700-800MB RAM usage speeding up my browsing experience? YES!
...if they supported Amazon's Look Inside feature, which has been non-functional on Opera for quite a while.
It would also be nice if I could visit My Oracle Support and log in, without getting a 500 Internal Server Error, which only happens when I use Opera.
That said, otherwise I'm pretty happy with Opera.
Opera has over the years led Web Browser Innovations and Developments.
The Built-in Speed Dial being 1 of them.
However, it has never been close to as customisable as the later developed Speed Dial plug-in/extension for Firefox and Google Chrome developed by someone called Josep del Rio https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/speed-dial.
That in it self has disappointed me a little about Opera to never updating its own original Speed Dial, hopefully then this update would change that.
Will be faster if you have enough memory? Curent version 700-900 Mb of memory if you have more than 7-8 tabs open (In W7 64) This is twice the memory mozilla eats.