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Opera pushes out 10.6 preview

Faster JavaScript, offline apps

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Opera has released a public beta of its next browser release, 10.6 - featuring support for royalty-free WebM video and HTML5 offline web apps. This will be the next major milestone for Linux and BSD users, since Opera is skipping an official 10.5 release for those platforms.

Opera claims the JavaScript engine is up to 75 per cent faster. We haven't benchmarked it, but it certainly feels noticeably more responsive. The speed crown changes hands almost monthly these days.

On older hardware it may not matter so much as the overall responsiveness and browser memory footprint. Working on constrained (translation: decrepit) hardware recently it was noticeable how much faster Google's Chrome browser was overall.

Opera split the release schedule of the various platform releases for the first time earlier this year, as it rushed out a Windows version of 10.5 for the Windows "browser ballot" for which it had lobbied. This left the Mac and (especially) Linux versions lagging a little. Both have greater use of native widgets in the 10.5+ builds.

You can try an example of the offline app here (It didn't work for me on the Mac version) and WebM video here: watch as Norwegian youths run riot through the streets.

The 10.6 release also adds geolocation and a few more UI tweaks.

The beta can be found here - it doesn't bugger up your existing settings - and read more about the changes at the Dev Blog

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Latest Comments
Anonymous Coward

Comparisons with Chrome.

http://i48.tinypic.com/2lc1g5c.png

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Like to see a good heads on

between Chrome 6.0 and Opera 10.6, comparing speeds, reliability, feature availability, memory leaks, etc. In any event, there's nothing keeping us from having both these browsers - and good old FF as well - installed on our machines, in particular now that Opera 10.6 has been made available for Linux boxes....

Henri

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@J3 @Dave Mundt

Opera is still beta on Linux. However some of the problems are also in the Windows build. El-Reg Wand problems are due to coding problems on El-Reg (they can't write W3C compliant code). Javaplugin is still W.I.P on Linux. Bookmark manager does suck, but I rarely use it, as I just type the name of the bookmark (or it's tag) in the address bar and it auto-completes it.

Memory leaking: Release builds of Opera rarely leak memory. I haven't seen anything in release builds (some of the betas of 10.5x did). More often it's peoples mis-understaning of how Windows manages the working set. http://my.opera.com/mitchman2/blog/show.dml/167116

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