Opera 9.5 Review: It is More Than Just a Beautiful Browser

Well, NOD32 doesn’t let me download it. It thinks it’s a virus. :(

It is currently not possible to use RoboForm with Opera 9.5. it’s a pitty…, I can’t use this navigator

I like the new skin actually. Takes some time to getting used too though! Nice job Opera team!

Didn’t Safari first introduce the “Show Inside Address Bar” feature?

And the description of the intelligent address bar description looks like it is the same as the Firefox 3 AwesomeBar :)

Opera fan boy in da house!

Man the new theme is so sleek! I noticed changes on webpage rendering. It’s a little bit faster :)

Whatever it is.. Opera does not have a large variety of addons available like Firefox has which makes it more customisable.

I too am trying out the new Opera.

However Opera reminds me of Microsoft Word; Word for one has so many features and its found that majority of them use only 20% of the features

Opera is the Word in browser world, they have so many feature and I end up using only a few of them.

May be to experience the new interface, we can install Opera. But web without firefox 2 is tough for me.

I tried Firefox 3 RC2 but uninstalled as I can’t do much without plug-ins.

The plugins that I use for web development, blogging and social networking are not yet compatible with Firefox 3.0. Few of the plug-ins have beta’s that support Firefox 3.0, but they crash often.

To be more productive and stop wasting my time, I uninstalled Firefox 3.0 :-)

Yeah, addons for firefox… Is that the only reason why firefox is so much slower than opera?

This 9.50 is just sublime to others. It has everything you need in a fast and beautiful package!

That is exactly what I have been shouting for ages !! …. Opera Rules and is the true inovator… Firefox is a HYPE BOX and just copies features from Opera ….

Long live Opera

gmail rendering issues still exist and much slower in loading pages when compared to FF

for firefox addons, opera has userscripts…arent too heavy like addon.
plus opera is fastest browser around! and it doesnt crash !!

i use maxthon browser and it is the most popular browser here in china

Opera is very slow and CPU intensive

CPU Usage when using Opera Only (one tab) was running was 29-31%.

When using my normal browser, Maxthon, CPU usage settled at 14%.

Maxthon (10 tabs) + Thunderbird settled at 15%

At post #7. There’s no argument that opera is the most customizable browser. Addons are a seperate thing; they’re features, and do consider that the contrast in numbers between the two browers is very little.
I’m not one sided though. FF is great, especially for developers, but Opera is just so ready and accesible that browsing becomes a flow of motion. FF3 is preveiwing keyboard shortcuts for example; Opera made them a thing of the past long ago.

In my opinion one can’t compare Opera with Safari or Firefox. It’s page rendering is extremly slow.

Thanks for pointing out those less-obvious but interesting features! Opera 9.5 is a nice alternative to Firefox 3 (unless you’re after some very specific extension), especially for when you’re in a hurry.

I personally like Opera’s new theme MUCH more than Firefox’s — but when it comes to the AwesomeBar, Firefox is a winner! I link on a few of the common features offered by these two browsers.

Most people would agree that there are some useful addons for FF, however many of the most critical ones are the ones already built into Opera (to me, at last - like ad-blocking, mouse-gestures, web developer tools etc.). So while FF and Opera compares quite well speedwise in a bare-bones install, I find that FF with the addons I need to make it an Opera-alternative feels much more sluggish that Opera.

@Swaroop: The “show inside” for page load (at least show inside status bar on bottom) has been part of Opera for quite a few years, and AFAIK the Awesomebar in FF3 came afterwards Opera added it to the 9.5 builds, but I’m not sure on this last point.

@Venu: Loads of people still use Words though. Not stating anything about how Words is programmed, adding features to an application is not bad, as long as they don’t make it more complicated or performance-heavy to use in it’s default form.

@Gopinath M: for web development, Opera Dragonfly looks like it’ll become everything you ever need. Install the link too. For blogging, my needs are covered by bookmarklets (for instance the one from tumblr.com). Facebook addons and similar you can just as well find in Widgets, although not as convenient until widgets gets dockable. What you won’t get yet is site-interacting addons like Stumbleupon.

They made Opera Dragonfly dockable, so maybe they can use the same tech to make Widgets dockable too :)

Facebook and Opera = broken. No “Friends Online” or links working.

I’m a long time Opera user, but this upgrade is driving my crazy. I’m sitting here typing in an otherwise static page and my CPU is pegged at 100%. No reason for it and it has been that way for an hour.

Rendering simple pages, i.e., eBay listings is noticably worse, with formating errors all over the place. It’s pretty much unusable when it decides to display a paragraph at 72point.

I would remove this and go back to 9.25, but the upgrade altered my email to a format that can’t be regressed. I’ll probably stick it out until them fix these bugs, but I wish they hadn’t felt they had to “scoop” FF3 and rush this beta out the door.

Opera doesn’t have extension still it has the functionality of 150 extentions hard coded on board. Opera is very customisable without having extensions.

Please join the Opera forums when you need help with finding specific functions.

Facebook was fixed last week. They fixed something on their end. Visit the Opera forums and see if we can help you there.

@Bob the Builder. Delete the opera6.ini when Opera is not working. It is in the profile folder (Help –> About Opera).

Hey, told me to use real name, so I will.
@Swaroop: Wrong in both cases. The first post, Opera had that feature before 9.5, before 9, not sure how much before that. It’s something I always turned off. I like having my loading bar at the bottom and not taking away valuable URL space.
Secondly, the “awesome bar” is not as awesome as Opera’s. Opera searches through the text of a page while Fx doesn’t. Fx relies on tags (or something like that) which if you want can be done via the bookmark description in Opera. Opera’s is more powerful.

@Spencer: Facebook has major code issues. I’ve looked at them. It’s safe to say there site isn’t the safest security wise.

I was happily using opera 9.27 (with the exception that I can’t use it to view blogger posts properly) till it prompted me to install the new opera 9.5 yesterday. After installation, my pc crashed the moment I clicked on the opera link. I tried uninstalling it and reinstall the older verion but opera still crashed when I clicked on the link. Now I can’t use opera anymore.

Any solution, anyone?

I installed OPERA 9.5 this morning. Its running on 50% of my CPU resources and 500MB Mem usage. Without having opened a singke page… Surfing normaly, it sucks 100% of my CPU.
I’m a opera fan, but I think I’ll have to change to FIREFOX for the moment!!

I had to install Opera 9.5 to test my web sites and once again it breaks more than it fixes. I have no concern about the look of Opera, however the printing still hasn’t been fixed and there are still issues with Frames. Come on Opera drop the browser as you can’t seem to get it right.

OMG! It gets worse - Opera 9.5 just crashed. Think the skin is causing a problem, get rid of the skin - who cares what the browser looks like - it’s about how it renders the web sites and how it deals with complicated code on web sites (well unfortunately it doesn’t). So opera once again fails to meet the basic requirements for me.

I’ve given up on Mozilla browsers. They just cant seem to fix various bugs in the linux version. Some bugs are 7 years old and they dont give a damn about it. I havent been very impressed by opera in the past but the latest version was a gift from above. Opera is fast, its stable and it doesnt make your computer feel like a 486 SX-33.

i installed 9.5 and get the same 100% cpu usage at idle, i uninstalled it and the problem went away - now i can’t install 9.25 :( ive used opera since the late 90’s :(

how can i reinstall 9.25 without the mail error???

How do I disable the so called “awesome bar” behavior in Opera?

I figured out how to do it in FF 3 but not Opera.

I saw somewhere else someone posted:

In Opera (which has a similar AnnoyingBar), go to opera:config” and find “Addressbar Content Search” and uncheck it, hit save, and relief.

I tried that but it’s still doing that.

@all those who have performance problems:
there are three reasons why opera takes about 100% of your CPU without even browsing:

1. as someone said before, they changed the mail system. when you upgrade, opera has to transform your mails into the new system. takes some time. but after about 10 minutes (depends on the size of your mailbox) it should be all right.

2. your old opera6.ini file is crippled, just delete or rename it before you start opera. i had this problem with my very very old version of opera6.ini.

3. opera 9.5 seems to have issues with large filter.ini’s. mine had some thousand entries. worked fine with the earlier versions, for opera 9.5 i switched to a smaller filter file.

if you check these 3 points, opera should run as fast as before.

Opera sips very modestly at the meager resources of my 2-year-old laptop. It had some stability issues at first, but they appear to have fixed themselves. The new Firefox seems to make Opera less reliable if both are up at once. Firefox has been much more greedy with resources, CPU being the most noticeable. I float ~100 tabs in my FireFox, Opera9.27, Opera9.5 installs. 100 Each.

9.5 has greatly improved the speed/smoothness of widget-based graphics and effects. TouchTheSky stutters a little on transitions in 9.27, but is rapid/liquid in 9.5, so they replaced something under the hood. Widgets consume less resources when running, too. After starting up, both Opera installs use much less mem/CPU than Firefox as they initialize fewer of the page elements. Many only kick in when you actualy VIEW that tab for the first time in a given session. This has a big effect on the overhead derived from shockwave banners and animated gifs. And I will never give up lost window recovery. At least Firefox, for its part, finally did something more sane about the prompt when closing multiple tabs. If the ENTIRE Firefox session is closing, it will not open the confirm popup, and Windows will not be required to “kill” it when shutting down. A major improvement that should have been part of the bugfixes in an earlier Firefox release.

Also, and I can not stress this enough: Opera provides a range of options to export/back up your important files, as well as parallel install and parallel operation. Some days, I have three installs of Opera getting along just fine at the same time. But Grace forbid I should run Firefox off my hard disk AND a pen drive at the same time! I might do something rash, like shuffle bookmarks or compare my open tabs! The Horror!

Dumb question regarding the Opera Progress Bar:

Why clutter the Address Bar, when you can see the same thing by making the Progress Bar pop-up temporarily at the bottom of the screen?

Or am I missing something here?

Paraphrasing, one need only…

“Go to Tools –> Appearance –> Toolbars and select the *Pop-up at Bottom” option under Progress Bar.”

-Robert Knight

Good review. Robert Knight, thanks for the tip about pop-up at bottom. I have been using Opera for a while now, but was not aware of it. Much appreciated.

opera is legitimately faster at opening webpages than ff (new times roman yuk) while explorer is stuck “opening”…even chrome is slower, i did a 10 webpage comparison- opera’s java engine is by far the laborghini- opera is like lightening it goes BONK loaded - chrome has a 2nd wave of loading after opera is done - i love speed dial so much!