Wandering electrons... but not too far

One of the most frequent requests in the Opera forums is how to "move toolbars" from one place to another in Opera. The helpful folks who are active in the forums are quick to point out that Opera's toolbars work differently from other browsers, but this is sometimes confusing for newcomers. The goal of this post is to explain Opera's unique and flexible approach to managing toolbars.

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No Beta's allowed...

Opera 9.52


Safari for Windows 3.1.2


Firefox 3.0.1


Internet Explorer 7.0

Version 9.5 of our beloved Opera browser has arrived, and with it a pretty good number of changes.

You can of course just "upgrade" your browser. What I mean by that is you go to the download page and install the new version over the old version. But with a relatively major upgrade such as 9.5, it might be (understand "is") worth it to do a clean re-install. When you've been using Opera for a long time, all the customizations, plus the upgrades, plus this and that, can start to have a negative impact on performance (Like Windows does as time passes). Sometimes a good thorough scrubbing is a really good thing. And here, with a major upgrade, certain unanticipated problems may appear that can be avoided by starting with a clean slate.

So!

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Opera caches webpages that you have already visited to improve the speed of the browser.

Nevertheless, starting with the 9.x version, Opera does, by default, send a request to the website to ask if anything has changed, and if so, it loads the new items. This of course is not a bad thing as it assures that you have the most up-to-date webpage to look at. But sometimes this can be "too much of a good thing". In particular when you use the back button. Indeed, if you're using the back button, that means that you were just there a few minutes ago, and the chance of something new AND important (i.e. not ads) being there is virtually nil.

For example, go to the New York Times and click on any article, and then on your back button. Did you see how there was a slight pause during which certain elements were reloaded? That's because the NY Times site "told" Opera that there was new stuff, so Opera loaded the new things in. But I'll bet a million bucks (uuh, that's just a figure of speech) that the only thing new was the ads.

What we're going to do is tell Opera to simply reload what it had previously cached, without checking for new items from the server. The result is that the back button takes you instantly and exactly to where you were, without the lag provoked by the renewing of content. I find that this really enhances my web-surfing experience.

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Ryan at CyberNet News published the results of his Windows browsers comparison, which includes both beta and stable versions of the four biggies: Internet Explorer (versions 7 and 8 Beta), Firefox (versions 2.0.0.12 and 3 Beta 4), Opera (versions 9.26 and 9.5.9841 beta ("Kestrel")) and Safari (version 3.1).

He tested Javascript performance, page loading speed, and memory usage. The results found good to excellent performance both for the stable Opera 9.26 version and especially for the 9.5 beta, but the competition is fierce from Safari and the Firefox beta.

For javascript, the Opera 9.5 beta came in second after Safari 3.1 and 9.24 was fourth behind the Firefox 3 beta. The last to cross the finish line--and long after the others were home in bed--were the Internet Explorer versions.

For the first page-loading speed test, done on the official Google blog, Opera 9.5 was the winner, beating out Safari 3.1 in second place and again 9.26 was fourth behind the Firefox beta. In the second speed test done on the Yahoo! Search blog, Opera 9.5 and 9.26 were respectively second and third behind the winner Safari. IE7 managed to finish 7th in front of Firefox 2 in the first speed test, but IE8 was last in both.

As for memory use, the surprise winner was the Firefox beta, using globally between 21.3MB and 124.7MB according to how many pages were open and for how long. The Opera versions were "middle of the pack", let's say. The Stable version of Opera was indeed better than the stable version of Firefox, but the beta version of Opera was behind the Firefox beta in all but startup memory use. Looking more closely at startup memory, the IE versions were, of course, the winners there, and the loser was Safari; surprising considering its excellent results elsewhere. The IE versions were however the worst for in-use memory usage (with multiple sites open).

The results of Ryan's tests seem to suggest that there is indeed a new player in town, and his name is Safari (despite a rather rough start). The difference in Javascript performance and page loading speed are pretty insignificant between Safari 3.1 and Kestrel (not to mention the significant improvements for the Firefox beta), but the Opera development teams are definitely going to need to start thinking of Safari as serious competition in the Windows environment (I'm sure they already are).

Yes, to summarize, the Windows browser performance wars are now a three-way battle between Safari, Opera and Firefox. Internet Explorer seems to be KO for the moment, its only advantage being its ubiquitousness.

It would be interesting to revisit these results once the various betas are all officially released. Indeed, testing beta performance is a bit like tasting a cake while it's still in the oven. In particular, I think one should not jump to conclusions concerning IE8's poor performance in Ryan's tests, as it is the least mature of the betas. But what is sure is that the folks at Microsoft need a lot of Gatorade if they expect to catch up with the others concerning performance.