What gave you that impression? I just ran it on the current beta build of Opera 9.5. Here are the results.

Also, not too long ago the development version of the Opera rendering engine scored 100/100 on the Acid 3 test. You can argue that the version of the rendering engine in the stable Opera release is bad, but according to the Wikipedia page on Acid3 the stable Mozilla build isn't significantly better at 53/100 vs Opera's 45/100.

If you meant speed-wise, at least for the 9 series my experience is that Opera has very fast JavaScript performance.

Anyway, I'm an Opera fan to be sure, but I feel that devotion is warranted... I've found it to be a very solid browser.

Opera 9.5 will be the first Opera which will support javascript good. Sadly Opera 9.5 has been beta for over a millennium and generally unstable. Try running tthe test in 9.25 or even better in 8.x

Of course i didn't test it so it may run even in 9.25

I'm a web developer, so i'm generally against any buggy browsers and Opera sure is one (not as much as IE mind you). For instance one typical Opera bug which plagued 8.x: if you resize the browser window only vertically, onresize event isn't fired.

However OS2007 uses Opera 7, which is very old and javascript support is almost non-existent.

Opera 8.5, actually, but the statement is still valid.

Um, yeah, OS2006 was with 7.x right?

Just tried Fennec and Minefield with my N800 on latest OS2008 - Text input is very screwy, but can be done with a lot of playing around. Google spreadsheets, which are hopelessly, even glacially slow to the point of being completely unusable with the regular MicroB, are tantalizingly functional with the new browsers. And yes, having the real Firefox with tabs will be a very nice thing. I don't simply want a finished version for the sugary goodness; I want to be able to get a lot of work done in Google Docs that just can't happen right now.

Aloha,

-Jeff Mings

Sorry for getting off topic, but I can't let it go when you bash Opera with shoddy info.

The first Opera 9.5 public alpha came out in September 2007. The first Firefox 3 public alpha was released December 2006. Even accounting for the fact that Mozilla is open source and the Desktop Team says they'd been working on 9.5 for over a year, doesn't seem like Opera 9.5 has been in beta much longer than Mozilla has. As for stability, I've used the pre-release 9.5 builds as my primary browser since they started coming out. I'll admit that the early ones crashed a couple times a day with moderately heavy use, and a build will occasionally break something major, but in general they're pretty good.

As for Opera 9.25 being no good with Javascript, I thought I already refuted that? The 9.2x series is the current stable release, and scores 8 points lower than the stable FireFox releases on Acid3. That's not good but hardly seems like the buggy, broken browser you seem to think Opera is. Also, while it doesn't really excuse it, some of Opera's bad behviour is because it tries to be bug-compatible with IE. Maybe not the best design choice, but if you're a browser with a small marketshare...

As for the 8.5-based build in bora, maybe you're right. I'm not going to try and defend the older Opera versions, since it's been so long since I used them. I will say that at least one JavaScript heavy site I use regularly, JellyFish.com, did work for the most part under Bora's browser (a field didn't properly clear after submitting, requiring a refresh to use it again) and worked pretty well. Under MicroB it works more correctly, and I won't deny that, but MicroB has quirks of its own (in my expreience more UI/user expreience related than rendering related) so I was wondering how the older browser would fare in this test. In any case, I've dragged the thread off topic long enough, sorry for that.

Yea, you're right, i didn't have too much trouble with the 9.2x versions, so i guess they fixed most of their problems. Recently i only had major problems with the 9.5 beta (maybe that's why it seems to me like ages), so much that i dropped its support for the time being. Mybe its better now 2-3 months later, but i don't want (or have the nerve) to check. IE compatibility was really a bad decision since Opera in IE mode doesn't imitate the Microsoft's browser too well and only causes further pain to the Web developers.

JellyFish.com uses Prototype, which has good browser support.

Yeah, lets stop this.

Sorry, but the comparison is both valid and useful. If the gecko snapshot used was buggy and slow due to being an alpha relase, that doesn't mean MicroB gets some sort of free pass. Someone somewhere decided to make that gecko snapshot part of the default (released) web browser for the nITs. If that snapshot was so bad, Nokia should have gone in a different direction for the Internet Tablets, even if that meant developing a custom engine.

Also, it is valid and useful because I want to know how the current version of MicroB stacks up against the upcoming releases of Firefox. I am not interested in any Diablo comparison until it is released and installed on my n810.

Ah, I get you -- but that doesn't discount that today the fastest available browsers on the IT's is Fennec/Minefield. For those using a browser for anything meaningful it is worth knowing that Fennec/Minefield is worth checking out for the speed & memory gains over the current microb. This MAY change in the future when Diablo MicroB is released; but Today and for the a while into the future Fennec/Minefield are on the top of the heap. ;-)

Nathan.

Too bad the iPhone's browser is cooler.

Post #50 is spam! BAN!