Opera Browser Finally Gets Hardware Acceleration
Opera has released version 12 of its web browser.
For those who are looking for an alternative browser next to IE, Chrome and Firefox, the latest Opera release delivers a few new features, most notably experimental hardware acceleration.
If you have been following browser technologies, you may know that Opera has been promising hardware acceleration for more than a year and originally promised this feature to be available with version 11. It's not final, but explicitly described as "experimental", so don't expect to function flawlessly just yet.
Opera 12 also comes with new themes, as well as webcam apps that include PhotoBooth, as well as Polaroid and Facekat. Polaroid even implements WebRTC functionality. Also new is an overhauled security engine that is much more transparent to the user, 64-bit support on Windows and Mac, improved JavaScript performance as well as right-to-left text support.
And just in case you are wondering, yes, Opera declined to comment on the rumor that it may soon turn into the official Facebook browser. Opera 12 can be downloaded from opera's homepage.
Actually memory footprint is the only thing that concerns me, but that's a typical problem for all modern browsers.
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2012/04/20/update-on-hardware-acceleration-in-opera-12
Opera 12: The first browser with native 64 bit support.
The first browser with (albeit experimental) FULL hardware acceleration (on BOTH OpenGL and DirectX) on every OS out there.
Then, when all the metro browser are out, another round with Firefox 15 x64 (it should be out by then, December), Chrome 21, Safari 5.2.x, IE10 (with updates, oh yeah) and Opera 12.5 x64 (or 12.1/12.2, the one that comes out by then)
How about feature and function comparison.
Opera 12 flies.
IE was the first 64bit browser....Opera is a few years late on that (about 8 years actually).... Unless you play browser based games, "acceleration" of DX and OGL in a browser is nothing to get excited about.
Not if it's only just coming out. I've been using Pale Moon x64 for a while now. It's a browser, it's 64-bit, I reckon it qualifies as a contender but there may still have been another Firefox project that got in first. ;-)
FF and FF derivatives have little trouble at all with memory usage right now. Download little Firemin (or palemin, seamonkeymin, etc. etc.) and it drops FF and FF derived browser's RAM usage to almost nothing. On that subject, lunascape also uses even less memory than stock FF even without a program such as the above. Luna generally stays below 200MB-250MB no matter how many tabs you have open, at least on my machines with the latest version.
- a great deal of the cache is in RAM - this allowed Mozilla to implement a real Private Browsing mode.
- images are kept unpacked as long as RAM is not scarce
- the Javascript JIT compiler keeps bytecode in RAM as long as possible to avoid recompiling
Meaning that if you reduce the amount of RAM, you're suddenly taxing your CPU a lot more and the browser might become less responsive. In some environments, such as mobile devices or SSD-based systems that lack a swap file and have limited RAM but have their fair share of CPU power and don't really do multitasking, this could actually lead to a better experience!
However, not making use of available RAM is, I think, a bad idea: setting up Firefox to be more aggressive on its memory management might help if you're often running several softwares that each require a lot of RAM, but my own experience tells me that said other software would be the one actually needing to be taught better.
The fact that Windows' memory and disk management plainly suck is another indication that it's not browsers that need to slim down - when I run a developer WAMP server, an SVN client, Eclipse, two database clients, Outlook and Word + Excel along with Firefox on 4 Gb of RAM and see the computer slow down to a crawl on 15 linutes checkouts while the equivalent setup in Linux hardly hits the swap file and does a checkout in less than 2 minutes, well, I don't think the browser itself needs fixing... There's better things to do than that.
So unless Opera had an x64 version of their browser before 2005, sykozis would be correct.
Even without something such as firemin, FF is already one of the most RAM-efficient browsers. True, browsers don't needs as much fixing as other software and Windows do, but it's not like there is anything that can't use fixing in the Windows environment. My point was that unlike what kartu said, memory usage is not a severe problem for all modern browsers. Also, I often use an old laptop with a Turion 64 X2 TL-60 and 2GB of RAM, so yes, I know how things work in RAM-tight situations.
Even with Pale Moon (a FF derivative) without palemin and just under 50 tabs tabs open, Comodo Dragon (a Chromium derivative) with 34 tabs open, a notepad, a calculator, a task manager, and an excel spreadsheet open, I do just fine on this laptop and have about 1.75GB of RAM in use. Granted, I'm running Server 2008r2 X64 instead of Windows 7, but that's still something. It does not slow down to a crawl, although it isn't as fast as it is with less stuff open and even then is obviously not as fast as some of of the higher end desktops that I use.
@blazorthon: I don't think using 2008R2 over Win7 brings much in desktop use. I should try setting mine to dedicate more resources to background services instead of foreground apps, that might help...
Windows Server 2008r2 x64 uses significantly less memory than Windows 7 x64 and x86, among other advantages. Yes, I've compared vanilla installs on the same laptop in the past and also included Vista x86 and XP x86 in those comparisons.