Opera "IS IT" !

11.50

Installed 11.50 on a number of Linux and Windows computers now and have been using it on a daily basis alongside firefox and other browsers. This version has most of the 11.10 kinks sorted out. And it feels as stable as ever - crashing out incidence is minimal on the 11.50.

Speed Dial

Speed Dial now renders faster. And it renders more accurately than 11.10. The thumbs now display more meaningful graphics on the websites.

Startup is quicker. The previous problem of un-ending circles are now sorted out. Sure it can be further optimised and feels as nippy as previous versions. Lets keep out fingers crossed for that.

Speed browsing

The speed advantage clearly shows on my netbook. As it is without a doubt faster than firefox and firefox related browsers. The user interface response is much quicker, the web pages load faster.

On more powerful desktop machine, Opera is still faster, yet the difference is less apparent due to the more powerful cpu, massive ram memory, and faster HD, which help the slower browsers that consumes more computing power.

Efficient coding

Opera low footprint + fast response + fast surfing + efficient coding is well matched to this cloud computing age. Hope this philosophy remains intact going forward in spite of the departure of the CEO.

Download of files

The user interface for files downloading has improved. But can be better. Will talk about my view as to how to improve it when I have more time in hand

Socks

Opera has finally added socks support. Useful for people who use it - and that include myself. Appreciate Opera's effort in responding to users' request.

Verdict

For day to day web surfing, Opera 11.50 has got to be the browser of choice. Even more so when you are travelling with your netbook!

Firefox would probably be there as reserve. For website that just doesn't work at all with Opera, and masking the browser still doesn't make it work, then the default last resort is to fire up firefox ! That usually works. Big thumbs up to Firefox for being the de facto testing browser!

Speed Dial is spanking new

The Opera team seems to have re-written the Speed Dial code. As it looks and feels different from previous versions.

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

The Good thing is that it is now easier to specify the number of columns the Speed Dial thumbnails to fit into. And the thumbnails just flow from position 1 to position 2, to position n - whatever number of thumbs you have.

The Bad is, I find it a bit harder, if at all possible, to specify the exact location of the thumbnails. When the upgrade was installed on the computer, all the speed dial thumbs that I previousely slotted into their respective "strategic position" are completely gone. In its place, we have thumbs that follow one another. No gap, nor blank space for me no more... Oh Dear...that's a surprise that I was not warned beforehand! As a result, my Speed Dial is still in a mess, and I am yet to find time to re-arrange, or find a workaround, or what have u. If anyone knows how to do it neatly, please let me know.

Speed Dial image rendering

Opera now has a different way of rendering the Speed Dial thumbnails. But I could not see the logic behind the change.

Firstly at startup, for anyone with no less than 20 thumbnails, you would likely be staring at a whole screen of spinning circles forever, and you starts wondering whether Opera is still the FASTEST browser in the market... until you give it up and startup with a blank screen of course. But that's something that I don't want to resort to, as the previous Speed Dial is definitely a winner, and I loved it !!

Naturally the startup (with the Speed Dial running and running) of this new version feels SLOW !!! For one, the old versions render the thumbnails once at creation time, and just load the stored thumbnails at startup, which is, in my humble opinion, the common way of speeding things up.

Storing large, detailed image of each Web Site, and do rendering at startup gives us a whole screen of spinning circles that seems to go on and on. Perhaps the Opera Team has some great optimised code up its sleeve, or perhaps there is a more complicated programming concern that led the Opera Dev Team down this lane. I don't know. Please, please, bring the real "Speed" Dial back !

And that's not all, after the screen settles down, you notice all kind of weird rendering of the Web Sites. Unlike older versions which rendered the Web Site beautifully, this version seems to be doing all sorts of weird things - you end up with very large letters in one, a big zoom of one corner of a Web Site in another, and a big zoom of a Web Site (but this time in the middle of nowhere and u have no clue what site that is).

Hopefully the code will improve in the next version.

It is an incredible feat the IBM scientists have accomplished recently with natuaral speech recognition, risk and confidence level assessment, decision making, hardware software integration ! It is impressive regardless of whether Watson wins over the Grand masters of Jeopardy in Feb 2011 or not. At its current state, it can beat most of the mere mortal population hands down ! Its next incarnation would be even more incredible !

Of course right now this beast consumes super computing power, doing lots of parallel multi cpu processing as and when it hears the question. In the near future, when computing power progresses, it is not inconceivable that it may end up as our "living room" Watson, right ?

With the kind of Vision ability as demonstrated by the new consumable products, the combined machine would be very incredible indeed.

Opera 11 Beta is here with us !

Speed

Amazing the Opera Team still managed to squeez performance improvement on the engine. My initial experience in the first few web sites : The web pages do feel loading faster than previous version (10.6x), and faster than other browsers no doubt.

Efficiency

The Speed-Up on its own would have fully justified an upgrade from version 10. But the Team just have to up the bar by reducing the installation/package size at the same time !! We users are just too glad that Opera keep adhering to its Tradition of keeping things as efficient as possible. Fast and Efficient. This "feat" is just so much appreciated these days in and among the midst of "bloat" wares all over the place !

Tab

Opera was the pioneer of Tabs, and is still the Leader in Tab Browsing no matter how you look at it. Its Tab just feels very much like part and parcel of the package. Very natural to use, and very well integrated into the Browser itself. Mozilla, on the other hand, as much as we love it for its Standard Setting, compatibilty, and compliance, its Tab browsing is unfortunately not yet in the same league as Opera. The user experience is just not as good as, or as natural as Opera.

Now the Tab Stacking is out. It is like something that, although we don't know about it; when it comes out, you'd go "how come nobody thought of it" ! It looks like an ingenius idea to me - nevertheless, I just need to try it out and see how much it helps web surfing in general.

Mouse gesture

Mouse gesture is the feature that gave me the "wow" effect every time I tried it out. Unfortunately it is something that I do not manage to commit to memory - I don't know why. Hence it did not get used to the extent that I'd have liked

Now armed with the new easier to use interface, I hope it would help me to re-kindle that urge to absorb that into my memory space, and soon will be surfing with all these mouse gesture.

Search Google

Version 10.6x has been having some problems with Google lately, where Opera hanged on the Google Search input box

Perhaps it is Google that is upgrading their clever engine, or perhaps there is some kind of interface between Google and Opera engines where I have not delved into.

Now that Opera has got a new toy - Google search prediction. So lets hope everything is smooth from now on.

Stability

Notice that there seems to be an improvement in stability over 10.6x. For some reason, 10.6x, on extended use, would suddenly froze... to sort our its memory or whatever, and U have to quit and restart it. Having said that, I think it is acceptable given that the Team have probably re-written a lot of the code to bring the browser to 10.6x. It's good to see that version 11 Beta has some kind of stability thrown in already. It does give us hope that the stable version would really be more "stable"

Dark Background

Improved. The Unix skin seems to iron out some of the "kinks" in dialog boxes and text input boxes. Well sort of cos I still noticed some little "kinks" here and there whether it is "black on black", "white on white" or what have you. Please please do more testing on the "Nix" platform to make the "default" theme works upon installation. I myself do not mind a little bit of twitching with dialog box and theme to make it work, but it is an area for the Opera Team to tune up a little bit to cater for the "Nix" users.

Nokia N-Series is pretty amazing and has the functionality of a mini laptop

Opera has already created an WebM-enabled build... Would most certainly give it a go in my next opeara upgrade.

Very skillful card manipulation. Look so impossible

Very talented !

Cards really seem to come from nowhere !!!

Angela Funovits Card Manipulation from Angela Funovits on Vimeo.