Kestrel Delivers On the Promise

Released two days ago, Opera 9.50 alpha 1, code name Kestrel, is an amazing leap for Opera.

It’s smokin’ fast!

Page renders are at least 50% faster, subjectively, and it was already faster than Firefox, or any Microsoft product. The amazing thing is that with added features, it is usually expected that performance will go down. Microsoft has trained us to expect this behavior, so we do.

I am not using it side by side - I’ll do that later and report on how things are rendered. At this moment, I am wondering how things are different -  I know that certain things are, but I’m at the feel and subjectively judge stage right now. The objective stuff will come later, perhaps when the first beta comes.

I have already had one crash, so it would not be wise to try this as your only browser just yet. The perceived speed and elegant look are amazing.

I am not a fan of the stock interface, so I always download 2 -  I use them both and it depends on how I feel. Shadowguard and Mirage Tango Fusion are some of the best skins I’ve ever seen. Color and proportion is great with both.

I have not used Firefox in a while, but I see it as I watch my son on his computer, and each time I realize that, while I liked the ability to customize, the customization caused memory leak troubles, and eventually Firefox felt bloated. I have quickly put Opera 9.23 and Firefox on a couple of the machines around the house, and the difference of stock Opera versus stock Firefox is amazing. Opera is so much faster. When the ’standard Firefox tuneup procedures’ are followed, Opera is still faster. Now this is a comparison with 9.23. On the machine I am writing this on, the difference is so dramatic between 9.23 and 9.50 alpha that it is somewhat scary - it makes you think something is not being rendered to gain speed. But when the pages I go to every day are looked at, the pieces are all there.

This is a great sign that there are still things to accomplish in a browser, besides adding on unnecessary gadgets or other extraneous stuff.

By the way, on one of the machines in the house, booting into XP and Ubuntu produces similar results - Opera is faster on both operating systems.

Download alpha here, Windows Mac, and Linux versions all available

Description of new features in depth

[tags] internet browser, Opera, secure browsing, standards conformity, speed of execution [/tags]