Opera 9.50 Alpha: Fast, crisp, and superior

Several days back, Opera 9.50 Alpha was released. For the time being, you can read more about the new features in Opera 9.5. Some of the notable enhancements include a better ECMAscript engine, improvements to the layout algorithm, faster font rendering, and a more responsive UI.

I’ve been using this alpha release for the past few days. And I have to say, I am quite impressed! While Opera has been known as a top-notch browser for years now, they’re really taking it a step further. When a new version of an already-excellent software product makes you think “Wow!”, you know the improvements are truly significant.

They’re not kidding at all about the speed and responsiveness enhancements. Opera 9.50 Alpha is very noticeably faster when it comes to rendering pages. The improvements to the ECMAscript engine are quite important on sites that use JavaScript heavily. While a site like Digg is particularly slow under other browsers, it is actually fairly usable with Opera 9.50 Alpha.

One of the things I have always liked about Opera is that it’s based around the Qt toolkit. As Qt is a native C++ toolkit, applications that use it tend to be fast and responsive. Opera is no exception. When compared to Firefox, the menus in Opera open quicker. Page scrolling is faster. Switching between tabs has no noticeable delay, as is the case with Firefox. The rendering of pages happens almost instantaneously. Overall, Opera just feels slick. And that slick feeling is evermore improved with this latest alpha release.

When it comes to providing an efficient, usable, standards-compliant Web browser, Opera has clearly become the leader. I think their only real competitors at this point are Konqueror and Safari. It’s uncertain whether Firefox will be able to catch up to them, even with their upcoming Firefox 3 release.

While Firefox seems to have become slower with each release, we’re seeing the opposite with Opera. Not only are we getting new features, but we’re getting significant performance improvements. So to keep it short, Opera 9.50 Alpha is well worth a try. And it gives a really good glimpse into how a high-quality product keeps getting better and better, besides offering a vastly improved Web browsing experience.

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