Opera News

Today Mac users can experience the next level of browsing with Opera. This next generation version (10.52) of Opera has a lot to offer - users will see great Mac integration, private browsing, and unprecedented speed.

Get ready for speed

One of the things that we're most excited about is the incredible performance that Opera 10.52 is capable of. A brand new JavaScript rendering engine delivers vastly increased performance - as much as ten times that of Opera 10.10, putting it at the top of benchmarking charts compared to other browsers. A new graphics library called Vega also allows for high quality, smooth graphics and animations in the browser interface and when rendering sophisticated pages that use next-generation Web standards.

How much faster is Opera 10.52 than other Mac browsers?

At Opera we take speed very seriously and we are proud of the speed improvements we have made in Opera. To illustrate the great performance that Opera has, we have conducted a series of tests. Here, we show the performance of Opera 10.52, Opera 10.10, Safari 4.0.5, Firefox 3.6.3, and Chrome 5.0.342.9 beta in two popular JavaScript benchmarks: PeaceKeeper and SunSpider.

The tests were conducted on a MacBook 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM under OSX 10.6.3 Snow Leopard. Note that results may vary significantly between different hardware specifications and software versions. We encourage running the tests yourself and please feel free to share the results you find.

Opera 10.52 performs extremely well in the SunSpider JavaScript test, taking only a tenth of the time that Opera 10.10 did to complete the tests. Opera 10.52 manages to edge out Safari. Results are quite close to Chrome 5, which is yet in beta, but we included the results from this non-final version since it is the version that was being offered on google.com/chrome when we conducted these tests.

In Peacekeeper, Opera 10.52 achieves an excellent score of 3,690 points. On Snow Leopard, Opera is faster than Safari, and beats all other browsers, excepting Chrome 5 beta. Note, however, that because Internet Explorer does not support it, Peacekeeper does not yet take HTML canvas tests into consideration - where Opera is a clear winner. Below is the Peacekeeper score with the complex graphics test taken into consideration.

With the canvas test factored into the results, Opera scores 4258 points, which extends its lead over the trailing browsers and nearly ties it with Chrome 5 beta.

Do you ever browse on a slow Internet connection?

In addition to having leading JavaScript performance, Opera features server-side compression technology called Opera Turbo that also provides a boost to browsing speed on slower connections. At 100kb/s, Opera Turbo can double connection speeds. On even slower connections, like dial-up, loading time can be brought down to less than a third of what it would normally take.

As you can see, Opera 10.52 for Mac OS is a tremendous achievement, providing an extremely fast and feature-rich option for Web browsing on Macs. We are very proud of our accomplishments, and hope that you will try Opera for yourself to get what we feel is the best Web experience available today.