Opera 9.50 beta
Opera released their first 9.5 Alpha today, nicknamed Kestrel. Usually I don’t use Opera, I use Firefox for webdevelopment with Firebug and similar tools but it’s pretty slow even on my fast new machine. For my everyday browsing I use Konqueror for it’s neat desktop integration (read ASpell, KWallet, Kio, Filebrowser etc.). And compared to Firefox Konqueror is fast.
But Opera… Well I knew it was fast but in their release note they mentioned even more speed improvements, also for ECMA Script (JavaScript). So I thought, lets give it a try and I have to say I’m pretty much flabbergasted. It feals like it’s more than double as fast as Konqueror! I really might start to use Opera more frequently now… Let’s see what else they got except speed!
Also very interesting is this part of the release note:
Platform integration
We worked to make Kestrel feel even more integrated with your platform. Mac users can expect a nice new visual look and feel, while Opera for Linux will add a QT4 build, so you can easily adjust your skin to match the desktop. 64-bit Linux/FreeBSD packages will also be available.
Neat! I’m really looking foreward to this since I prefer programs which adapt to the widget styles I use and see in other (KDE/Qt) programs.
Downside
Even in my first few minutes of usage I encountered a few problems, most notably some layout quirks with form elements which resolve after a refresh of the page.
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