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Opera Desktop Team

Painting performance fixes

By Petter Nilsen. Friday, 28. March 2008, 13:55:30

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This week we've been working on performance on Windows and Mac painting. You should see performance increase by 2x to 10x on heavy DHTML pages. Performance increase depend on the test page, graphics card, and OS used. To see the improvements for yourself, compare the previous snapshot to today's release on the following test cases:

Performance test 1
Performance test 2

Under XP, with a AMD 4600+ X2 CPU and a NVidia 7600 GT gfx card, I see a 9x performance increase. On other graphics cards and OSes, the performance improvement will differ.

It's worth noting that this optimization is in painting performance and might not yield similar improvements on regular web pages without DHTML or other graphics intensive operations. We have also done some performance optimizations in Javascript garbage collection and memory allocation of ECMAscript objects, which should be visible on all platforms.

Many of the Acid3 fixes we've made are still undergoing testing and further development, so you will not see Kestrel achieve the same pass rate on Acid3 for the time being. If you want to test our GOGI build for ACID 3 compliance, head over to the Opera Labs.

WARNING: These are development snapshots: they contain the latest changes, but they also have severe known issues, including crashes and data loss situations. In fact, they may not work at all.

Known issues
  • Opacity is inverted on Windows.
  • Opening Help will cause Opera to crash.
  • "Open With" other browsers doesn't work.
  • Save As for a web page only lets you save as "HTML file" on Windows.
  • The progress bar does not show if it's set to "Pop-up at the bottom".
  • On OS X, scrolling to the bottom of a page with the scrollbars does not work.
  • GMail might not load.

Changelog
  • Several download fixes
  • Fixed funky parsing problems on YouTube.
  • All downloads and saved content (except web pages) are now put in the transfer window for easier access
  • Viewing source should now work properly with applications that need a file extension to work
  • UNIX: Fixed a Flash crash
  • UNIX: Made the mplayer plug-in draw itself in the correct size again
  • UNIX and Mac: Fixed various command line bugs
  • Calling substr with negative length now returns an empty string
  • Array indexOf now treats a non-numeric second parameter as 0

Mail
  • Fixed problems expunging or moving messages on certain servers
  • Fixed issue where the "Contacting Folder" status message displayed the wrong count

ACID3 fixes
  • Zero bytes in encodeURIComponent and encodeURI are now handled correctly
  • Unicode escapes can no longer be used to put non-identifier characters into identifiers

Download
Windows
Windows Classic
Macintosh
UNIX

Public Acid3 buildAcid 3: Opera first to 106

Comments

lamarca 28. March 2008, 14:54

thanks for the new snapshot

Tamil 28. March 2008, 14:57

:eyes: :up:

Robin Zalek 28. March 2008, 14:58

Excellent, shame I have to go to work rather than test.

Justas 28. March 2008, 15:00

Today was really busy day :D

Anil 28. March 2008, 15:03

How come Tamil always manage to be first-second to post a comment?

Anyways. Is gmail working and progress bar when set to po-up at bottom?

GrantTLC 28. March 2008, 15:03

I don't know what 90% of this means to the actual web-browsing experience, but thanks! :yes:

MetalRaise 28. March 2008, 15:04

Why has the "Use a single profile for this computer" checkbox been removed from the setup routine? I prefered to have the profile folder inside my Opera Beta installation folder, now the profile folder is located somewhere in C:\Documents and Settings\blabla...

@ cranil7:
No, progress bar still not working when set to "Pop-up at bottom".

rwf 28. March 2008, 15:04

Are we ever gonna get a .1 variant (static) build? (GNU/Linux - Intel Linux)

Blaz Pristy 28. March 2008, 15:07

Comment removed by moderator. Do not post the same thing multiple times, and please do not post off-topic comments, such as feature requests here.

Hermen 28. March 2008, 15:11

Wow, this build performs much better on the "new" Yahoo mail :yes:

Bill P 28. March 2008, 15:12

Woot causing 100% cpu in 64bit Linux - not consistently but did it 3 times in a row with this build

James Cassell 28. March 2008, 15:12

Yay! 2 things to download in one day!

Petter Nilsen 28. March 2008, 15:16

@MetalRaise: Open OperaDef.ini and change Multi user to 0 in it.

It was changed because using single user will not work on eg. Vista.

Bill P 28. March 2008, 15:17

Gmail - loads once (after startup or cleaning of cache) but not afterwards as in previous couple of weeklies

Wade 28. March 2008, 15:18

thanks for the build. operapluginwrapper seems to use 40-50% of CPU time when watching Flash videos. Unix build

D'n Russler 28. March 2008, 15:23

Great, thank you all for the build! More Saturday eve...

Irontiger 28. March 2008, 15:28

Great, thanks!!

rwf 28. March 2008, 15:34

Thanks for fixing the scrolling issue when a page has a link highlighted via spatial navigation. Don't have to to hit escape anymore.

@Wade: Look at the the size of libflasplayer.so and compare it to operapluginwrapper. libflashplayer.so is a beast. Use FlashBlock.

Herwig 28. March 2008, 15:38

It's a bit sad that long text/plain HTTP and local files are still not rendered completely (known bug since last build, but not listed as such either).

Performance improvement is noticeable on many pages! So thanks for this new build anyway.

Cheers, Herwig

Sergei Stolyarov 28. March 2008, 15:51

Hmm, I have set “block popup” and there is still no progress bar on gmail. changed to all other values — the same result.

Alexs 28. March 2008, 15:58

Execute program buttons don't work (build 9864)

Andrew Davidson 28. March 2008, 15:58

You're doing something weird there Opera... aren't you?

I've just tried the dhtml benchmark (1) in the new build and current latest and IE and FF3b4.

Forgetting current Opera and IE, in FF3b4 it starts up way faster.

FF3b4 starts at 95fps but gradually declines until at about 120dots it hits 60fps too. By the time there are 200dots it's down at 42fps.

Opera sits at 62fps though and stays there... all the way up to about 250 dots and only at that point does it start to decrease!? It only gets down to 42fps at 400dots.

What is going on there?

phip 28. March 2008, 15:59

I created a new profile folder for x86_64 Linux build 1887 and failed the acid3 Test with 79/100. Is this of interest? I could provide the result dialog text but this doesn't seem like the right place to do it.

Andrew Davidson 28. March 2008, 16:00

Ohhh same thing in test 2.

You're not v-syncing are you?! :O

--

Test 2.

FF3b starts at 84fps and by the time it hits 170 objects its at 60fps. By the time it hits 400 objects its at 50fps. (not a huge decline)

Opera starts at 64fps and sticks there through to 320 objects, when it starts to drop (63fps). 50fps comes at 500 objects.

Jeff ™ 28. March 2008, 16:02

Cool a New build. :up: :coffee:

Maxim 28. March 2008, 16:02

if start progressive raytracer (http://nontroppo.org/timer/progressive_raytracer.html) few times (basic render), without reload page, it work slower and slower. Looks like in all browsers. Why? Is it bug of browsers?

Petter Nilsen 28. March 2008, 16:05

@mrd: it's due to timer resolution, which is 16ms on Windows, so 62 fps is the highest real measureable fps. Check the js code, it does a setTimeout(0) which translates to 16ms right now.

Andrew Davidson 28. March 2008, 16:07

Ahhhhhhh. Thanks mitchman2. I thought either I (or you :D) were going nuts there. Heh.

oscardt 28. March 2008, 16:09

Clicking the InIE button, available at http://operawiki.info/CustomButtons#webdev (Open Page in IE), results in the error message "no registered application for this extension".

I think it's a safe guess to say this is a result of the fix: ["Open With" other browsers now works].

I dont know if this should be considered a regression or that the custum button needs to be updated.

Just pointing it out.

Andrew Davidson 28. March 2008, 16:09

I keep wondering just how many code bases you've working on here with the labs stuff with ACID3 and Kestrel and the live 'final'.

I go nuts at work havin to work on 3 or more codebases with regressions and the like between them.

Hmm. Just thought I'd give something a go here. Interestingly... the acid3 labs release of earlier... the second test is running at 64fps still at 465 objects. :O

Scratch that... 550 and counting and still 64... eek. Opera 10 looks like it could be "quite brisk" heh

650 and counting at 64...

Tim Altman 28. March 2008, 16:10

@phip: Read the text of the post above regarding Acid3.

operakappa 28. March 2008, 16:11

No Solaris x86 builds ? :frown:

lamarca 28. March 2008, 16:17

"open with" other browsers still doesnt work.

rseiler 28. March 2008, 16:19

-Opera still crashes-on-exit for me in Vista, something the last build did for me too (perhaps those who also saw the issue last time can give us an update). I was hoping for some clue from Opera if they're at all aware of this issue, and maybe give us some background on it so we can see if working around it is possible, but they didn't speak up last time.

-I'd recommend adding the Personal Bar gray-out issue to Known Issues.

João David 28. March 2008, 16:26

@lamarca: confirmed. I've tried "Open With" and it did not work.

MartinezZ 28. March 2008, 16:26

""Open With" other browsers now works." - Really? But not for me :frown: WinXp x86 SP2. Tested on upgraded and also fresh installed Opera.

Andres 28. March 2008, 16:27

Wow, you're great !
I don't know how to thank you.

kxp 28. March 2008, 16:38

wow, this is nice. too bad this release doesn't have the full 100 acid3 support yet but good to know you've done it in one developement release.

Got my dhtml perf up from 230 dots to 910@25fps dots :D

oscardt 28. March 2008, 16:43

Gmail - loads once (after startup or cleaning of cache) but not afterwards as in previous couple of weeklies

By Bill_P, # 28. March 2008, 16:17:04

I can acknowledge this bug On winxp SP2.The first time visiting the gmail website it worked fine. But closing that tab and visiting the site again results in a hang on the : "Loading..." in the right corner. Refreshing the page doesn't help.

Bartek Sumowski 28. March 2008, 16:47

awesome

i did a clean install - it's faaast


'open with' works 100%

Kyle Baker 28. March 2008, 16:58

Well, I'm mainly looking forward to seeing these acid3 improvements worked into the weeklies. Glad to see that two more were fixed and hopefully the following..

you will not see Kestrel achieve the same pass rate on Acid3 for the time being.


..doesn't mean a very long wait. P: We do after all have to beat the competition at releasing a public stable build that passes..you know..just for some more attention!

Also, why are the dhtml improvements just applied to Windows and Mac (just curious)? I'm running Ubuntu x64 and tested 3 times so far in the previous build and this latest build. From the little testing I did, I see improvements on the first test, but the second test remained relatively the same. I'm not sure if further testing would lower the margin of difference in my tests, but it seems that this build is a bit faster on the first test.

Kristoffer 28. March 2008, 17:00

@rseiler:
maybe you should make a bug report, attaching a crash log? :wink:

Andres 28. March 2008, 17:00

All downloads and saved content (except web pages) are now put in the transfer window for easier access


Nooooooo :down: It was solved ! Believe me it is one of the most annoying "features" you can add to Opera, everytime you save an image or content inside a Web Page...Opera goes from the Web Page you're browsing to the Transfers Bar, how disturbing is it. Please, remove that feature. Yes you can customize Transfers Bar to work in the background but when it will be ready for normal public, they wont know how to deal with such annoying "feature". Please...please !!! :no:

Lars Andersson 28. March 2008, 17:03

The speedups in those two tests are huge. Very impressive :)

Tim Altman 28. March 2008, 17:06

@kylebaker: The painting improvements are only on Windows and OS X. Other optimizations are cross-platform.

Hypezor 28. March 2008, 17:06

Great improvements on www.deezer.com.
You're on the good way ! :D
Seems like a great build after few minutes; let's see after few hours ;D

Buchtic 28. March 2008, 17:16

Opening webpage from localhost is still not functiom. eg. between C:\myweb\index.html is opera transfer url on C:%5myweb%5index.html and then CSS and images aren´t loaded

Andrey Petrov 28. March 2008, 17:16

WebKit 31388 (Mac OS X):
Test 26 passed, but took 95ms (less than 30fps)

Opera 9.5 4729 (Mac OS X):
Test 26 passed, but took 245ms (less than 30fps)

Herwig 28. March 2008, 17:18

For some reason, I can no longer open any links starting with mms:// using this build - the previous one worked. I get an error box "No registered application for this extension".

Edit: bug report 320301 filed.

kallube 28. March 2008, 17:24

For some reason opera is crashing on ubuntu 8.04 beta. Where can i upload crash dumps.

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