CyberNet Exclusive Look
We’ve decided to break away from our normal CyberNotes today to take an exclusive look at the features in Opera 9.5 (codename Kestrel). Opera has done a remarkable job of keeping the specs and features of Opera 9.5 under wraps. The Opera Desktop Team wrote a post last week that detailed some of the under-the-hood work that has been going on in 9.5, but as expected, they steered clear of mentioning the most notable features. After all, they want to save the excitement for the big Alpha release tomorrow!
Luckily I was able to test drive Opera 9.5 a little bit early, and it’s only fair that I share my findings with you (and we have Opera’s permission of course). I’ve put together a 5-minute video review that details four of what I believe to be Kestrel’s most notable features. So you can start out by watching the video, or you can read through the article as I cover each feature there as well.
–Video Introduction–
I thought it would be best if I start with a video of Opera 9.5’s new features. All of these are covered in detail below, but this will give you a really good idea of what you can expect tomorrow when Opera 9.5 Alpha is released.
–Rendering Engine–
It’s been over a year since Opera’s rendering engine has seen any significant improvements, and this time around there are some significant improvements. Kestrel is now running the same rendering engine that powers the Wii Internet Channel browser as well as Opera Mini 4 Beta, and there are some astonishing differences…probably due to the thousands of bugs they’ve fixed.
I’ve been told to expect to see the rendering speed get better as further builds get released, but I have a hard time believing that they can get better than what I’ve seen. I decided to do a rather unofficial speed test to see how fast the different browsers rank in terms of loading our site (with an empty cache). I did three tests for each browser and averaged out the time it took for each to completely load our site. Here are the results with the slowest browsers first:
- Internet Explorer 7: 18 seconds
- Firefox 2: 15 seconds
- Opera 9.23: 12 seconds
- Firefox 3 Nightly: 11 seconds
- Opera 9.5 Alpha: 8 seconds
Aside from speed improvements, the site compatibility has also gotten much better. They’ve fixed problems with various Google sites, some issues with the default WordPress template, and corrected a few things with some of the JavaScript libraries. Opera 9.5 can now handle many more sites…with ease!
Here are some of the other updates in Kestrel related to the rendering engine:
- A lot more CSS3 support, including complete Selectors
- Support for JavaScript 1.5 Getters and Setters
- AJAX compatibility has been improved
- New JavaScript engine that is faster and more efficient
- Improved HTML table layout algorithm
–Open With… (in the video)–
Despite all of the hurdles Opera has overcome with their new rendering engine, there are still some sites that probably won’t work as they should. Opera isn’t going to deny that it happens, and they are actually going to do what they can to help the situation. You can now right-click on any site and choose to open it in another browser that is installed on your computer!
I’ve also been told that the “open with” command will work with some files as well, but complete support hasn’t been added yet. I would like to see this feature extended to things like images so that I can right-click on an image and have it open in Paint.NET without needing to save it first.
–Restore Windows (in the video)–
Opera has a little trash can on the Tab Bar that is normally used to restore tabs you’ve recently closed (which can also be done with Ctrl+Z). Kestrel has introduced a new feature that will let you restore entire windows that you have closed, which includes all of the tabs contained within that window. I don’t open multiple windows very often, but I know this feature will come in handy.
–Sync Bookmarks (in the video)–
This is one of those things that I had said Opera needs to work on the most. By this point, most Firefox users have grown accustomed to keeping their bookmarks synchronized with an online service. Now Opera users will have the same pleasure! All you need is a free My Opera account, and you’ll be able to privately synchronize your bookmarks, Speed Dial sites, and Personal Bar with their server. You’ll then be able to access that data whether you’re at work, home, or anywhere!
To setup synchronization just select the “Synchronize with My Opera” option from the File Menu.
–Full History Search (in the video)–
The search capabilities in Opera 9.23 vs. Opera 9.5 are like night and day. They have now introduced full history search that looks back over all of the pages you’ve visited. I’m not talking about just scanning the URL and title of the page either…it looks at all the text contained within each site!
There are two ways that you can take advantage of this feature, and the most common one will be straight from the address bar. As you can see in the screenshot above, I was typing in “thumb” into the address bar, and the resulting page that was returned is our homepage. That’s because I had recently visited CyberNet where “Thumbnails” was one of the words used, but it wasn’t in the title or the URL, it was just in the body of the article.
If you’re looking for a more detailed way to search your entire history, just type opera:historysearch into the address bar. The result will be a Google-like search page where you can type the keyword(s) that you are looking for. It will then return the results that matched just like in this screenshot:
–What You Don’t See–
It’s very obvious that there has been a lot of under-the-hood work in Opera 9.5, and you’ll be able to see that as soon as you start using it. There has particularly been a lot of fixing up for the built-in Mail Client. Now it has a new indexing and storage backend that doesn’t use as much memory and runs faster. IMAP also works much better, and the browser isn’t supposed to freeze anymore when checking for new mail or feeds.
Of course Opera still starts almost instantaneously, which is one of its best qualities. And memory usage has (somehow) gotten better. I’ve never seen Opera 9.2 climb over the 250MB marker, and that was when I would have 50 to 100 tabs open at the same time (hey, I go through a lot of news in a days time). Now it seems to run at about 80% of the memory usage that it used to, and for most people it will hover between 25MB and 70MB.
–And There’s More!–
I’ve covered most of the big stuff above, but that’s not everything! Here’s a list of some other things that have been improved in Opera 9.5:
- The Status Bar is enabled by default…yay!
- The “Save your password” dialog box does not stop the page from loading behind it. That way you can verify that the username and password you entered works before actually saving it. What a great feature!
- Content blocking is better
- A “drag to scroll” feature has been added that will let you scroll by “grabbing” the page, much like in a PDF reader. You can enable it by typing opera:config#UserPrefs|ScrollIsPan into the address bar.
- It supposedly looks better on a Mac, and conforms to the Apple Human
Interface Guidelines. Unfortunately I don’t have a Mac to try that out on.
–Making it Better–
There are some things that I believe Opera can do to make the final product even better, but one of the most important is inline spell checking. This is often the first complaint I hear from existing Firefox users who try Opera, and I think it is an extremely useful feature.
–Overview–
There’s no doubt in my mind that Opera 9.5 is going to be a truly amazing browser once it is released, and it will likely raise the bar for other browsers. However, the build being released tomorrow is an Alpha, and it will have issues at first. There might be sites that don’t work properly with it, and if you decide to try this out, make sure to install it in a separate location from your stable Opera installation.
For more details on some of the backend work done to Kestrel, read this article posted by the Opera Desktop Team.
| Update: |
Opera 9.5 Alpha has been released.
|
Good stuff,thanks for sharing.Opera is still treated like a bastard son,i send off so many emails to new startup’s that don’t support it.
Thanks for sharing this. The big surprises for me are history search and “open with” added by default (and it looks like it could open pages in another Opera installation, what I didn’t manage to customize until now).
Now I’m looking forward even more to get my hands on Kestrel tomorrow.
Syncing – at last! Great news!
Digg here:
[digg.com]
Thanks for the news, but it would have been nice to add Safari 3 beta in the unofficial speed test…
Thanks but no thanks.
Until Opera comes with the Source Code, I’m sticking with Konqueror.
Please, post videos in OGG format, so users of every platform can watch it.
Re-opening closed windows has been around for a long time. Window -> Closed and pick from the list.
I’ve used it many times.
Enable spell checking in Opera: [opera.com]
@JohnB, Currently you can reopen only closed tab.
it would be nice to have Firefox launch within opera,similar to ie tab but instead “firefoxtab”.also if firefox extensions worked within an opera “firefoxtab” i would ditch firefox in a heartbeat…..hope that made sense
I hope that the history search is something that you can disable, although it might be very useful to some people the low foot print and low resource usage of Opera is key to why I use it.
waiting for opera9.5~
thanks for your share?
The only thing that interested me in this review was the rendering speed increase. The one thing I’d want to know before I’d consider adopting it is how big is the install? I chose opera over all other browsers because of its speed AND small size. I don’t care AT ALL about added features… just that it stays small and fast.
thanks for posting it, very nice stuff from Opera
!
Really amazing I am excited and waiting…
One that makes me happy is the support for the overflow-x and overflow-y CSS properties.
Ah…this is so badass. I’m so glad Opera’s rendering engine got a tune up, as that was my biggest problem with it.
Other than that, everything else is just kinda “meh” for me.
I was going to, but I didn’t have it installed at the time.
The video is in Flash…so I would think that it can play in almost any browser.
Unfortunately that’s not inline spell checking.
I’ve often thought about that before as well, but that could result in some big memory issues. The IE Tab extension in Firefox has some huge memory leaks, and is one of the extensions I tell people to often uninstall.
I haven’t noticed a worse footprint on Opera because of the feature, and it is super fast. I don’t think it will be something people find necessary to disable if they’re worried about performance. Memory usage in 9.5 is still much lower than 9.23 for me.
The installer that I received was 4.95MB. I’m not sure how that will compare to the one released tomorrow, but I imagine it will be about the same.
I wasn’t overly excited about some of the features either, but once I started using them my tone changed. The bookmark syncing requires absolutely no thought on your behalf, and it makes “redoing” your browser painless since you don’t have to worry about backing up your bookmarks. The history search is a feature that you won’t understand how cool it is until you start typing in the address bar…it’s really pretty sweet.
>The “Save your password” dialog box does not stop the page from loading behind it.
Hooray! was asking for this since 8.0 ! (You can find me even moaning in Rijk’s blog)
Dying to doanload it!
[comment]
The video is in Flash…so I would think that it can play in almost any browser.[/comment]
Yes I know but some people use 64bit systems (like me) and there is no Flash for us so far. I can run 32bit Flash in 64bit browser but it is not as stable as 32bit Flash in 32bit browser OTOH running 32bit browser with 32but Flash in 64bit environment is just stupid waste of space – I need a lot of 32bit compatible libraries to install 32bit apps. There is nothing wrong with Flash of course but as I said before OGG format is more “platform independent”.
The history search improvements will be useful.
Can you tell us the Opera build number?
When it is available, where may I download it, Please?
@elderOp
Go to [my.opera.com] The alpha should be available tommorow.
I have had this build for a few days now so it might not be what gets released tomorrow, but it is build 9494.
Cool features they’re adding but I’m missing one thing. Opera has been very difficult when it comes to customizing keyboard shortcuts and for example, the search area (next to the address bar) doesn’t seem to have a keyboard shortcut associated with it and there seems to be no way to specify one. I hope they fix that.
Why is it a good thing that the status bar is on by default. What purpose does it serve? You can hover over a link to see where it goes, and there’s a progress bar inside the address bar. As far as I can tell, it just needlessly takes up part of the screen.
Thought you might be interested in another’s perspective on how long it takes each browser to completely load your home page (never having loaded the site before):
IE7 (Vista): 12 secs
Opera 9.23: 12 secs
FF2: 7 secs
I’m not sure what’s going on with your IE7 and FF2. I would have been shocked if FF2 took 15 seconds, because I rarely find it slower than Opera. It’ll be interesting to try v9.5.
Also, on the History feature, I sure hope it doesn’t rely upon in any way the “Addresses” setting in Options/History, since, as I’m sure you know, there’s no better way to kill Opera’s startup time than to increase that number to something like 1500 or higher. Unfortunately, I do, since otherwise the address history is lost in about a day. I hope 9.5 handles it more like FF and IE, which keep address history for *weeks* without breaking a sweat (and by default).
I’m surprised the sync feature donn’t let you sync notes, contacts, toolbars, sidebar and widgets… or at least you didn’t mention it.
I believe that it’s a good thing because people are accustomed to it in every other browser.
That’s odd, but I tested them all on the same computer and I know that there was no background “noise” going on.
No, you cannot sync those things. They may add more things as the pre-releases progress, but initially you can only sync the three things.
Woo, great! I love the Opera since I’ve got the access to Internet! And it still gest better. And it forced another browsers to faster development.
Keep it up!
meh, no 64 bit linux version
correction to above, yes there is a 64 bit version. woohoo
Good to hear that Opera has added some more features. I am a fan of Opera and beleive that its the fastest browser. But i use firefox and IE also. The problem with Opera is that some sites wont be displayed properly here. The Open With feature is a really nice one. I use the IE tab add on in firefox to open some sites which wont display properly in firefox. Now i can more frequentlty use Opera. Hope the opera team will include a speel checker and “add on” feature soon like in firefox.
The “open with” feature is indeed a great idea and a service to Opera’s users.
But it might be good to point out two things
1. Page display problems in Opera have become globally very rare already. yes-yes-yes it happens, but it happens in Fx also (as Thoma mentioned) and even in IE. I’ve been using Opera since 8 something and I can count the page rendering problems I’ve had on one hand.
2. In the rare cases when a page doesn’t render correctly in Opera, 99.99% of the time it’s due to the non-respect of W3C standards. Remember, Opera is a fervent defender of the idea of cross-browser standardization norms.
Anyhoo, thanks for the review! Vive Opera!
Opera doesn’t support East Asian languages that well on Linux. Rendering is fine on Firefox and best on Konqueror.
Hope they would correct that in this next version.
Good to hear about the new features.
I have always liked Opera’s RSS reader, the browser’s good unicode support and ofcourse it’s eye candy effect.
[static.flickr.com]
I am not satisfied with the Unicode support on it’s mobile version ,Opera Mini, though. Has anyone been successful in getting Indic unicode properly rendered on Opera Mini 4 beta, Symbian OS? (i tried on Nokia N75)
Hey what a great news!
Opera is one of my most used applications.
Bookmark sync is great ( but I prefer del.icio.us as a backend for this ).
If they’ll add categories/tags support in mail and RSS/newsfeeds than I need nothing to launch except OS and Opera
.
Tim
[gtd-tools.com]
Excellent review.
Thanks.
Try opera:config#OperaSync|CompleteSync
greetzz wykop.pl
I like the new SVG capabilities
Just wanted to report in that I get 8 secs loading your home page with Kestrel. So our Opera 9.23 and 9.50 figures agree exactly, yet our IE and FF figures vary wildly. Maybe you could retest those.
IE7 (Vista): 12 secs
Opera 9.23: 12 secs
Opera 9.50a1: 8 secs
FF2: 7 secs
I tried that Adobe Reader-like scrolling pref, no good! Why? It completely disables text selection and in-site dragging. What they should do is make it replace the middle-click, not replace dragging.
I also don’t like the double-click text context menu.
An absolutely essential pref…
opera:config#UserPrefs|UseIntegratedSearch
My biggest thing: Y!Mail still doesn’t work. At least there’s the helpful ability to launch alternate browsers.
One good improvement: before, clicking OK in an options page would often take very long to go thru and temporarily freeze the browser. I haven’t noticed this behavior once since.
Opera keeps alternating between “synchronizing” and “sync complete” + “logged in as…”, w/out me adding bookmarks. Does this thing do history also (a good thing)?
Also, is there any way to access synced bookmarks on a website (my.opera.com)? There should be. Then I could truly access my bookmarks anywhere, requiring nothing more than logging into a site. Now, you’d have to install Opera 9.5alpha wherever you want to access your bookmarks. Until a site is setup to list bookmarks as links, this feature won’t be useful to me.
Actually, opera already has a built-in spell checker. You need to install ASpell however before it would work.
BUG: When the tab bin is empty, and you close a background tab, the tab bin remains disabled.
I did three tests on every browser, and averaged the results.
I’ve read that Yahoo! Mail will work great by the time 9.5 is released.
That’s coming as well, but they wanted to get a version in the hands of the public early on so that they could start fixing bugs.
I did know about that, but ASpell does not provide inline spell checking like Firefox.
Opera 9.5 BETA build is to be released that week. 9.5 alpha and post alpha builds are yet stable and work great. Portability doesn’t show the shadow of a bug outside the known issues. Having it running from a usb key while testing daily snapshots ’s a must. And so easy/quik to “install”.
Nevertheless, beta release is firmly waited. Seems to be a major moment in Op’s life. Hope you’ll test it at Cybernet, your articles really make sense here in France! By the way, I’m just new here at CN, and my other comments won’t be that long.
Keep doing the right job & Thanks !!!
We are really glad that you enjoy our posts, and we hope that you will continue commenting! We will definitely be taking a look at Opera 9.5 Beta, but I’m not sure if there will be anything extremely notable that is new. Opera always has something hidden though.
I think it would be great if you test all the browser include k-meleon, safari, netscape to make sure which one is really the fastest browser in the world. Nowadays, I use opera. But when I open youtube to see the investigation that done, I always see Safari is win. Avant Browser also fast. But, i also see Opera is the slowest in the youtube. So, sometimes I use safari. Its really faster. i test with both in empty cache. I also make sure my computer stable. It can surf [download.com] in about 14 seconds but opera (9.23) surf that website in about more than 40 seconds. Opera 9.50 alpha maybe more than 30 but less than 40. Hope you tell this issue to the opera corporation because I very like opera and wants to see that Opera is the fastest Internet Browser in the world.
We are planning to do a benchmark test, but we will probably hold off until Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5 are closer to production quality.
I only came back to day to review these comments .
A big thanks to welcome me, first of all.
Nice you take time to answer at nearly all comments I post, even if sometimes we don’t think the same. In fact, this is what communicating should always be, talking about common passions we have or things we know without never getting neither injourious nor angry, even in the contradiction.
Thanks, and hello from a 3 nations common boundary place!
France,Spain,Andorra).
We love the community that has developed here, and that is why we enjoy commenting on what people have to say. We really appreciate your participation as well. And hello from Iowa!
I posted up the beginnings of a comparison between Firefox and Opera in a WikiVS page:
[wikivs.com]
It’s open for anyone to edit, so contribute what you know!
Why did this article activate my lap-top built in web camera? I don’t like web pages that do that