The largest mobile internet browser firm Opera Software has come back with its latest Web browser Opera 11.5, which is basically the upgrade of Opera 11.1. Impressive in its new form, Opera 11.5 is much better than its preceding versions and is better than other browsers in more than one way. We delve deep into the features of the browser and compare them against others like Chrome and Internet Explorer.
Featuring an improved user interface, the new browser comes with the speed dials, which they introduced in Opera Web browser 4 only to discard it in successive upgrades. The webpage allows you to stack numerous speed dials at a time, where you can put your favourite websites for instant access, just like Chrome.
Accessing a website is quite fast and when you are running Opera Turbo, you can save up on the data used during browsing. Turbo does it by compressing a webpage through Opera server software. Google Chrome does have something of this sort and is called Google Web accelerator, but Turbo does a better job. It supports HTML5 and so can run websites that are compatible with HTML5. Other factors which makes Opera 11.5 faster is the use of hardware acceleration, which means processing is done through graphics card and not through CPU, since GPU is better at depicting graphics on a webpage than CPU.
Opera 11.5 looks cleaner and lighter with very few buttons, including a hidden panel button on the left bottom that showcases your bookmarks, widgets, notes, history, etc. Click on it and the hidden panel will appear with a column of icons. Adjacent to the panel button lays buttons for Opera turbo, Opera Unite and Opera Link. When turbo mode is on, it shows before the address bar in blue colour. Click on it, and you will know how much data it saved while browsing.
An interesting feature in the browser is the option to open a private tab alone, which is missing in other browsers like Chrome 12 and Firefox 5. You can open more than 20 tabs at a time and browse across without any hiccups. In fact, you can stack the tabs on either side of the webpage. Stacking on left or right side of the webpage looks more tidy and organised.
Opera 11.5 has assigned all search engines with a one letter keyword like ?g? for Google. To look for something on Google, type the g and the word in the address bar. You can also search through the search bar, adjacent to the address bar. In the search bar just type the word and a whole lot of search options, followed by any previous searches of the same word and then the search engine you want to opt. All this makes searching for files in Opera 11.5 exciting and user friendly. It saves a webpage on the cache and can be opened in other browsers from the Opera browser itself, a feature that is lacking in other browsers.
In terms of performance, we tested Opera Web Browser 11.5 on two online benchmarks. First is the Acid 3 to test a Web browser?s ability to render a webpage accurately. Second is the Sunspider 9.1 Javascript benchmark for measuring Javascript performance of a Web browser. We ran the same benchmarks on three of the recent browsers Firefox 5, Chrome 12 and Internet Explorer 9 and found Opera 11.5 leaving them behind in the Acid 3 benchmark, registering a score of 100 out of 100 to IE9?s 95, Chrome 12?s 97 and Firefox 5?s 94. In Sunspider, Chrome12 led with 287.2 milliseconds, followed by Internet Explorer 9 with 265 milliseconds, Opera 11.5 with 252.5 milliseconds, and Firefox with 237.5 milliseconds.
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