Skip navigation.

The Falcon's Nest

... how to soar with Opera...

How to change the 'perceived' page loading speed...

For many users coming to Opera from IE or Firefox, it often appears that the page loading -- especially if there are lots of images -- is slower and / or visually jarring. This is in fact an incorrect impression. NonTroppo has shown through his painstaking experiments that Opera is indeed no slower than any other browser in page rendering. Then what seems to cause this prevalent misconception?

The answer seems to lie in the refresh rate -- or the interval of time at which Opera re-renders the page content. This is a setting that can be controlled through Preferences > Window >> Loading, but the smallest (i.e. fastest) one can set this is to refresh every second.

One can, however, hand-edit the opera6.ini file in one's profile folder (see Help > About Opera for Preferences for its location). Here's what to do:

º Close Opera
º Open the opera6.ini file in a text editor
º Under the [User prefs] section, find the line that looks like First Update Delay=N where N denotes redraw time in milliseconds
º Change N to the desired value (e.g. 200)
º Save and close the file
º Start Opera

On QuickTime plug-ins...Opera email client and user authentication

Comments

chaimav 6. July 2004, 15:06

Wow, works like a charm. I wonder why Opera didnt default that way, maybe to save processing power?

orinoco 6. July 2004, 15:06

er...

Go to

tools > preferences > windows

then set loading to redraw after the desired limit.

Is this not the same thing?

neeraj_deshmukh 6. July 2004, 15:06

The ini file edit allows you to set values that are not available through the Preferences dialog (e.g. values less than 1 second but larger then 0).

whatsinaname 6. July 2004, 15:06

Does this apply to 7.6 as well - the value is set at 0. How is this slower than 200? Editing ini files is so far a mystery to me, so this may not be a brilliant question, but nonetheless!
Thanks.

neeraj_deshmukh 6. July 2004, 15:06

Yes it does. 0 implies redraw immediately, which is already available via the Preferences > Windows >> Loading menu.

It is, in fact, more frequent than 200 (the higher the number the less frequent the redraw is). However, redrawing entails some cost (CPU etc), so if you redraw often enough it can actually slow things down overall.
Download Opera, the fastest and most secure browser
December 2009
S M T W T F S
November 2009January 2010
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31