Opera Pulls Out the Stops

Well, it appears that Opera has been listening, much to my surprise. It was just a week ago that published my article about five steps to fix Opera, the culmination of many years of my frustration with the browser, and yesterday they release a new alpha of their 10.0 browser, which addressed many of my issues.

Apparently, they had been listening and working on many of the problems for quite some time, just very quietly (perhaps they were also hunting rabbits).

But is it everything that I had hoped for? Well, not quite. However, it shows a great deal of promise and has a lot to offer for us Opera outcasts that have been pushed to using Firefox, Safari or Chrome because of how incomplete the Opera offering has been.

So what’s new and how well does it work? Here’s my breakdown of the latest features and how well they perform.

Inline Spell Checking

When I read that the new version of Opera FINALLY introduced inline spell checking, I literally jumped for joy. I had been dying for this feature for some time and have been enjoying testing it. For the first time, Opera is finally a browser capable of handling my email, blog posting and other work-related tasks that take place in the browser itself.

However, the early iterations of spell checking are a bit disappointing. In fact, as I type through this post in Opera, it doesn’t catch words that I misspell as I type them. Rather, it seems to catch them some time later, often times after I hit “save” on the post. This is unlike Firefox or Safari, which check the words right after I hit space.

While that isn’t bad per se, it is annoying and it forces me to go back through everything I write a second time to make sure I didn’t miss any squiggly lines. It is not terrible by any stretch and it is much better than what Opera did have, but it still doesn’t bring it up to parity with Firefox and Safari.

Still, it makes it at least usable as a browser for work-related tasks and that is the main goal for me right now.

Improved Performance

According to Opera, their new browser is 30% faster on the “real Web” (as opposed that darn fake Web the other browsers routinely surf). With it’s new Presto 2.2 engine it is indeed much faster than 9.62. It’s smooth, renders everything that I use regularly well and seemed to handle most complicated sites with ease.

That being said, according to download.com, it is still not the fastest browser, at least on JavaScript. Though the improvement in JavaScript performance is remarkable, it doesn’t quite tip it past the latest builds of Firefox.

Still though, the speed improvement is very noticeable and it works remarkably well. Even though the benchmarks put it behind other browsers, I can’t notice any extreme difference between the three, something I could before.

In short, it may not beat Firefox, but it at least is a viable alternative now, something it wasn’t before.

Mail Client Improvements

The email client also underwent some minor improvements. Though I lamented the state of the client and am glad to see it get some love, this really wasn’t what I had in mind.

The addition of HTML email is… ok. It is debatable whether this qualifies as a feature though. It had always been able to view HTML email and sending it doesn’t really add that much to me. Granted, I don’t send much email that even asks for HTML formatting, but I really don’t think most users need or want this feature. I just turn my Gmail formatting off and use text exclusively.

Though I am glad to see them thinking about the mail client some more, the fact is that the client is still kludgy, especially with account set up, and doesn’t feel robust enough for daily use. Still, I am going to try it out for a few days and see how it works, that is something that takes longer than just browsing around to really get the feel of.

Standards Compliance

I said it before that I don’t care what your score on the ACIDX test is, I just want my sites to work. Being standards compliant is great, but it is more important to be forgiving and able to work with sites that might not be perfect.

The new version of Opera seems to do that a bit better. Errors that I saw in previous versions are gone and even high-intensity sites work well. It’s hard for me to really hammer this point home without a few more days of trial, but it seems to me that they’ve finally figured out how to be both tough and forgiving on standards issues.

Other Items

I’ve noticed a few other odds and ends that, at the very least, I didn’t see on the previous versions of Opera.

• Memory Usage: On my Mac, the new Opera seems to be neither stingy nor bloated in the area of memory usage. After being up most of the day with many dozens of tabs opened and closed, the browser is currently using about 300 megs of memory. That puts it on about par with Firefox or Safari on their good days.
• The Phantom Bar: I’m noticing that, (sometimes) when I do a fast scroll, a faint grey bar appears on the screen to mark the previous location I scrolled from. I can’t get a screen shot of it as it disappears quickly, nor can I make it come up reliably, but it is there. Not sure if I like it or not.
• Issues While Loading Pages: If the reload button has been turned into the stop button, meaning that the browser is loading elements of the page, Opera is almost useless. The scroll wheel does not work, hovering over a link does not produce the hand icon and the browser seems to shut down until the last bits are downloaded. Frustrating at times, but made worse by the fact that it seems to keep trying to load elements long after it is clear to rational people it isn’t coming.

All in all though, these are issues and bugs that one might expect from an early alpha release. Still, despite it’s status as a test build, it has remained remarkably stable, not crashing on me even once after two full days of use. In short I’m impressed.

Conclusions

Many will point out the obvious about this Opera release, that the new features are just designed to bring the browser up to parity with Firefox, Chrome and Safari. The new features, for the most part, are just catch up releases and don’t really add anything new.

This is true. It is also true that Opera is still behind in other areas including extensions, speed and privacy.

However, Opera has always had something of an upper hand in other areas. A secure browser with a built-in mail client, good theme support (no need for a restart) and a robust user experience without the aid of extensions.

Opera’s desktop browser may not be as popular as Firefox or even Opera’s mobile cousins, but it is a solid browser with a lot of good cause to check it out.

It isn’t for everyone, it never has been, but it is now my default browser. That is, until I decide I’m tired of it and switch back to something else…