Opera enables hardware acceleration, matches IE9, beats Firefox and Chrome (video)

@BdgBill

"Through all this "progress" they have continued to ignore their biggest problem."

What on earth gave you that idea? Do you even know what Opera is doing about it? Are you reading their site patching blog? Their changelogs?

Obviously not, since if you had, you wouldn't have made the blatantly false claim that "Opera is ignoring it."

And the fact is that all browsers have compatibility problems. Chrome, for example, doesn't work well with Gmail(!).

@Xeno

Yes, Opera is cutting edge. Why do you ask?

@Dreke

"What on earth gave you that idea? Do you even know what Opera is doing about it? Are you reading their site patching blog? Their changelogs?"

I have been using this program on a daily basis for over 13 years. I have been to the Opera Blog and their community forums. Their standard answer about sites that will not load properly is that the site authors did not respect web standards. The result is the same - works in IE, works in Firefox, does not work in Opera. Since the rest of the program works great and the program has been ported to every device with an "on" switch, I assume the team is ignoring the compatibility problems in favor of more attention grabbing improvements.

@infinity

You can find full history of Opera versions with details about certain features here:
http://www.opera.com/docs/history/

@Dreke - Oh no I wasn't asking, that's my conviction.

You read what BdgBill mentioned - it renders many websites with flaws, it has issues engaging web media and whatnot.

This is your cutting edge(?) *rhetorical*

@Xeno People keep saying Opera has problems rendering sites, but I use Opera as my main browser, and I can't say I've had many problems with that. Could you at least give some examples of these "many websites"?

I'd also like to know what you mean by "engaging web media and whatnot". If you're talking about Flash, it works perfectly here.

@Xeno

Chrome, Firefox and IE8 all render sites with flaws. Your point being?

Are you trolling?

@BdgBill

"Their standard answer about sites that will not load properly is that the site authors did not respect web standards."

Why are you blatantly lying like that?

You have clearly NOT read what Opera has officially been saying about this, since they have been very clear on how they handle compatibility.

If some random guy in a forum told you that, it's irrelevant, because this is about what OPERA says and does.

But please, stop blatantly lying. At least educate yourself about what Opera Software is actually doing and saying about these things before commenting.

@BdgBill

"Their standard answer about sites that will not load properly is that the site authors did not respect web standards."

Why are you blatantly lying like that?

You have clearly NOT read what Opera has officially been saying about this, since they have been very clear on how they handle compatibility.

If some random guy in a forum told you that, it's irrelevant, because this is about what OPERA says and does.

But please, stop blatantly lying. At least educate yourself about what Opera Software is actually doing and saying about these things before commenting.

@Dreke No one's "blatantly lying". Instead of accusing the poster of that, you should offer suggestions such as setting Opera to report itself as another browser to the offending web page and see if it then works correctly.

The poster is spot-on, however, about Opera spending its resources trying to become other browsers. First was its mad race to become the "fastest", as if people could notice the fraction-of-a-second real world differences in some of the benchmarks. Sadly, when new betas were coming out, posters would complain about losing 50 points on this benchmark or be happy about picking up 3 points there, encouraging this. They also changed the interface to look like Chrome. Next they decided to offer extensions, which Opera doesn't need, to try to be Firefox. As someone once put it, "Firefox has extensions; Opera has features." One of the Opera people even joked that now they should take all of their existing features out and make them into downloadable extensions. Despite the "I'm kidding" he offered, I think even some of the Opera people saw the somewhat useless effort being put into giving extensions to Opera.

Meanwhile, Opera is sadly broken, especially under Linux. It's memory use per web page has grown larger and larger with each new version and its memory use per page under Linux is now about double what it is under Windows. Not only that, Opera never releases memory allocated once a new tab is opened. You can end up with having one tab open and 1.5GB memory in use. Opera has a small group of rabid fans who will follow up any post about this on their forums with claims that Opera will use memory depending on how much memory is free and even more bizarrely say that it will give it back "if other programs need it". That's the role of the operating system, not the web browser, and tests show this doesn't happen anyway. (It's 100% reproducible, even with the memory cache turned off - which does nothing, showing that it's seriously broken, perhaps being forced to on and use all available memory). Then the posters will intentionally fight or say something that enables their moderator friends to lock the thread or delete it entirely. I've collected evidence of thread after thread about this closed by the actions of the same handful of people, saved a message from a moderator that had an implicit threat in it of losing my account after I provided evidence that one of the people doing this had been banned previously and opened up sock puppet accounts, etc.

Opera's bug list is private, so despite users having submitted bug reports for this non-memory release (which also occurs in Windows) since Opera 10, there's no confirmation that Opera even considers this a bug. No Opera employee will publicly comment on the issue or even explain how Opera (mis)manages memory.

Tom's hardware did a browser shoot-out in the middle of 2010 for Windows and Linux. Opera won the Windows shoot-out, but they declared that "Opera tanks in memory use under Linux."

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/opera-chrome-firefox,2689-11.html

This was the main reason Opera lost the Linux shoot-out. Again, no comment from Opera at all about one of the biggest review sites pointing out the atrocious memory use and failure to release memory after tabs are closed in Linux. Despite fan denials that this problem even exists, Tom's declares "The Norwegian browser gives back essentially none of the RAM it used with 40 tabs open." When I brought this up at Lifehacker during a browser discussion, one of the same group of rapid bug-deniers called them "phony results" and then said that I "hated Opera and wanted to destroy it". On the contrary, I'm a user of Opera since the paid days and now that I've moved to Linux I'm finding Opera's ballooning memory problem can render it unusable even on a 2GB system. Right now I'm learning about extensions that make Firefox work like Opera and will then switch, at least until I hear that Opera has fixed the memory problem - although they also have problems with syncing large bookmark files, no longer being able to add duplicate bookmarks into different folders (their solution to the failure to sync large bookmark.adr files was to try to force people to have smaller files), automatically appending ".com, .net, .edu" to web addresses was broken so you could type searches in the URL bar like you can do with Chrome and they won't let you change this back, etc.
There's a whole host of unannounced changes and long-standing bugs that Opera doesn't even acknowledge (and the "private" bug tracker is ridiculous, at least for non-security bugs). It's driving away a lot of us who've been with Opera since the beginning. If we mention any of these things on the "support" forums, we're heckled or told an equivalent of "we're holding it wrong" then a bad word is used so the moderators will lock the thread and prevent any of us from responding. Some people have found such hostility they've set up their own blog pages so these things can be discussed and users can work on workarounds without harrassment. We really don't care about being faster than Chrome in Javascript, being able to add extensions like Firefox, or having hardware acceleration like IE9 (with quad-core 3GHz CPUs priced at $100, I doubt most people need their YouTube to be accelerated). We'd like all of the broken features fixed, the outstanding bugs fixed (or at least acknowledged), attempts be made to match Firefox's low memory footprint rather than its extensions, and polish applied to all of the features Opera's added then abandoned while it went off to win the benchmark wars.