The Opera team released version 9.5 alpha of their acclaimed Internet browser today after working for more than one year on it. The changelog lists hundreds of changes, fixes and improvements, some of the most notable ones are: Performance improvements, site compatibility, new mail and news storage and indexing formats.

I conducted some speed tests with various browsers, including Firefox 3, Firefox 2, Opera 9.22 and Internet Explorer 7 and decided to test Opera 9.5 to be able to compare results. All browsers were tested against the following three websites: Digg.com, Cnn.com and Google.com.

It turned out that Opera 9.5 is faster than every other tested browser when opening google.com but slower in opening digg.com and cnn.com than both Firefox browsers were back then. I know that digg.com and cnn.com have dynamic homepages and digg had a interface change since then as well.

continue reading "Opera 9.5 Alpha released"

Today seems to be browser day on the Internet. After the Firefox update this morning a new version of Opera was uploaded on the Opera ftp site. It usually takes a few days before the official announcement will be made available on the Opera homepage. If you are an early adopter and can’t wait to test the new version I suggest you head out to the Opera ftp site and download the version that you want to use.

The update from Opera 9.21 to 9.22 went without problems but I would suggest to backup your installation if you want to be on the safe side. A changelog has not been uploaded yet which makes it hard to find out what has been changed in this release. Someone active in the Opera community surely would know more about the update at this point.

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continue reading "Opera 9.22 available on ftp"

Firefox is still on the rise in Europe where it reached an impressive overall 27.8% market share in June 2007. Finland, Slovakia and Slovenia lead the pack with 45.4%, 40.4% and 47.9% market share while Great Britain, Spain and Italy still linger at the bottom with a market share below 20%.

Mozilla Firefox gained 3.4% market share over the course of the last four months in Europe and it does not seem that an end is in sight. The global level is also seeing an increase with Oceania still leading the field with a market share of 28.9%, North America with 18.7% and Asia with a disappointing 14.3%.

If the trend continues Firefox will most likely break the 30% barrier in Europe this year. The release of Firefox 3 could also drive even more users away from Internet Explorer who is still having the unfair advantage of being shipped with every Microsoft operating system.

continue reading "Firefox still on the rise in Europe"

A great feature called SpeedDial has been recently added to Opera. It’s a solution providing quick access to your “Top 9″ websites and it’s faster than using Bookmarks. However the limited number of sites that you can add does not make it a universal feature to speed up surfing in general.

I have been using Opera for a very long time but did not know what the so called Nickname feature for Bookmarks was all about. I’ve been ignoring them or filling them with nonsenses until I understood what they are for and how useful they can be. I wouldn’t mention it if I wasn’t concerned there’re still many of you who have never taken advantage of this feature, especially if you are new to using Opera.

continue reading "Speed up surfing by using Nicknames in Opera"

What a pleasant surprise. The Opera development team has published a new version of Opera raising the version from 9.20 to 9.21. The new release fixed a number of crashes and memory leaks making Opera even more resource friendly. Downloads are available as usual for Windows, Macintosh and Unix.

The full changelog lists the following changes:

• Setting weight for UI fonts now works again
• Larger search field in speed dial, looked a bit chunky on smaller resolutions
• Added Yahoo Answers to built in search
• A number of crashes fixed and memory leaks plugged
• Proxy PAC files now read from system on Windows and Mac
• Windows media player 11 NP version now works without crashing

continue reading "Opera 9.21 out"