Opera 10.5 vs Chrome-5.0 Dev – Fastest browser on earth?

March 3, 2010 Chilling_Silence Product Reviews

So Opera 10.5 is out. Naturally I can’t just take somebodies word that it’s faster than Chrome, which I’ve been happily using for around a year now, so I’m giving it a good run for its money and posting right now from it.

Now I’ve long since left Internet Explorer, way back probably almost a decade ago (Wow I feel real old now) when Firefox was called Phoenix. Browsing was “fast”, and these flashy new things called Tabs were cool. I’ve bounced around a little bit over the years, mostly sticking with Firefox until Chrome came out. Again, it was love at first sight (or click?).

So, what do I think of Opera?

Well initial impressions are nice. It reminds me of Chrome in many ways, and I’m not about to go getting into who stole what from which browser, I really couldn’t care less. I want a browser thats fast, reliable, and renders pages well. So naturally, the first thing I do is load up Facebook! Facebook loaded up surprisingly quickly, even compared with Chrome-5.0. Now I’ve been using Chrome for a while so I grabbed a fresh profile added under another user account. I dunno why but for some reason Chrome semi-regularly “freezes”, even when I’m typing text like an Email in Gmail, scrolling up and down halts for a few seconds, and I have absolutely no idea why?! It even seemed to do that in Chromium OS?

In terms of “rendering” a page once it’s found it, Chrome seems marginally faster, same for time taken to finish loading the page, but for some reason Opera “feels” better, as it shows the pictures loading and doesn’t try and show the whole page at once. I’m not sure what’s going on, but to be honest (And I’m scared to admit it) I think I actually like the “speed / feel” of Opera better.

I’m not a fan of having to Ctrl + Shift for a background tab by default in Opera, that annoys me. Why not make Ctrl + Shift the shortcut for saving a photo instead and just Ctrl + Click to open in a new background tab? Makes more sense to me?

I could swear that Ctrl + W closed the whole browser at one point for me too, but it appears I may have been mistaken.

I do like how you can hover your mouse over a tab and it renders a preview, similar to the Windows 7 / Vista Taskbar. If you double-click just above the address bar (below the tabs) it’ll pop out and make the tabs larger so you can view the pictures permanently. A nifty little feature, if a screen-hog.

I’ve also found that aside from Facebook pages seeming to fire up quicker, Google Mail (I use GAFYD for all my domains) also shows the new emails a lot faster than Chrome does. I’m not sure if that’s because Chrome is caching more but yeah, I was impressed at how snappy Opera was.
I wasn’t however impressed with the Copy / Paste. My sig includes a picture, so I have to copy it out of a saved Starred email each time and paste it into a new one. When I copy it in Opera, I lose the formatting and it comes out as plaintext. However if I copy it from Chrome and paste it into Opera, it comes out with the colors and picture as it should. Disappointing Opera.

Opera also uses a similar style “omnibar” to Chrome (Again, !caring who had it first), which is nice. Search results come up faster in a full Google Search in Opera compared with using Chrome. Again unsure why but they do.

Website layouts seem pretty standard across the two. I noticed that in Chrome, the Acid3 test takes long, and also displays these couple of small squares for a split-second up the top-right. Opera doesn’t do that, and both get 100% for a final layout look.

For some reason, when you open a new Tab, you get Speed Dial. Cool, I like that feature and use it in Chrome (When it loads before I can type the URL that is). However they’ve used Ask.com in the Speed Dial in Opera, while they use Google as the search engine from the address bar. Why not pick one and stick to it?

There’s a fair few widgets, which seem to run as standalone applications. I don’t like the idea of them clogging up my taskbar, but whatever. I wanted a Google Mail checker, like I have in Chrome which checks 3 of my GAFYD accounts. Nothing like that in Opera. Bummer.

In terms of overall look and feel, both are now surprisingly similar. The tab scheme up the top is practically identical in terms of size, just some very minor differences.It makes me feel almost naughty saying this, but I think I actually like Opera more than Chrome right now. After having used Opera for even < 24 hours, I’ve begun to notice how much Chrome “lags” at times. I’m impressed with Opera to say the least. Will I switch permanently? Who knows, maybe, but it’s shown me that there’s certainly some contenders out there!

Browser, Chrome, fastest browser on earth, Firefox, Internet Explorer,