A quick and dirty benchmark of Opera 9.5

Posted by Phil on June 18, 2008 under PC, Web Development | Be the First to Comment

So a day or three ago Opera 9.5 was released.  I didn’t realize it had been released until after I had read about it on lifehacker, gizmodo, and/or engadget, but it came out and the masses rejoiced (lifehacker is still throwing a party about it).  Back in the day I loved Opera, the tab feature was my favorite (before firefox came along).  I use opera on my wii, and I even used it on my mobile a while back (the mobile is gone, in case you wondered).  I read a few stellar reviews on it, and after seeing how it handles speed-wise, I decided to give it a shot.  With everything that I’d read about Opera 9.5, I came out with very unexpected results.  Opera is by no means a developer browser… at all… seriously.  I mean it’s really sad when IE can b!#%h slap a browser.  Don’t believe me?  that’s what screen shots are for.

I set up a test, I ran Opera 9.5, Safari 3.1 (for windows), IE7 With the Web Developer Toolbar running, and Firefox 3.0 (released today*!) with many plugins running (Firebug 1.2.0b03, ietab 1.5.20080310, fireform 0.6.3, Web Developer 1.1.6, and Html Validator 0.8.5.2).  Here are snap-shots of my task manager after the browser had been opened and left on a LOCAL html file for approximately 5 minutes.

Safari 3.1 (above) – No CPU usage, and a very respectable 34MB** of memory being used.

Firefox 3.0 (above) – a little CPU, and a little more memory (this is most likely due to all of those plug-ins I have running)

IE7 (above) – better than firefox, and not chewing on any CPU… very interesting (and by that I mean I’m a little surprised).

Wow! that sucks!  I mean what is Opera even doing?  50% of my CPU and over 300MBs of RAM? I don’t remember them signing up with the SETI program! (ok fine, lame joke, I get it).  Seriously though, that’s just nuts for a browser!

Ok, now that we’ve seen the damage after being open for a several minutes, let’s minimize all the browsers to see how it can behave down in my task bar (and hopefully free up some memory).

Safari 3.1minimized (above) – Nice, it just fades away into the background waiting to be used.

Firefox 3.0 minimized (above) – Well at least it gave up the 2% CPU it was chewing on.

IE7 minimized (above) – Explatives!! under 4 megs of memory!?! that’s it, the world has gone mad…

Opera 9.5 minimized (above) – wth!?  Still chewing on 50% of my CPU and crunching 170ish megs of ram?  Why is everyone going nuts over this browser?  Did mine not come with the hypno-ray?

Anyway, I’m sure that everyone’s experiance will vary.  Especially on other platforms.  I mean who knows, maybe in linux or on a mac Opera really is the best browser.  Also I didn’t even cover all of the cool features that Opera has (and yes it has some really sweet features, so I’m keeping it installed).  So go grab it and see if it destroys your system like it did mine.

*I started this post yesterday, so firefox really had been released “today”
**Yes we all know that a mb is actually 1024k not 1000, but hey getting too critical just makes it easier for me to make fun of you.
This test was run on an intel Core2 6600 @ 2.4GHz with 4 GBs of ram.