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Opera's real speed advantage
by Dave_K on Fri 8th Sep 2006 09:58 UTC
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In my experience Opera has a significant speed advantage over both IE and Firefox, but the important difference isn't in the rendering speed that's tested here. An extra second here and there due to rendering speed is completely insignificant to me, most of the time I open pages in the background and don't even see them load. The important thing is responsiveness and efficient use of system resources, I don't want the browser to slow to a crawl or consume all my PC's resources when I push it heavily.

In Opera I tend to keep interesting pages open rather bookmarking and closing them, and often open a large number of pages, for example using the Links Panel to simultaneously open all the interesting links on a news site. They load in the background while I read another page and are there for me to flick through using ctrl+tab. Obviously YMMV, but I find that to be a fast and efficient way of browsing through large quantities of information on the web.

Opera can cope with that and stay responsive and stable, something that isn't true of the other browsers I've tried. Being able to browse heavily without interruptions, using a GUI that I find more efficient and elegant, saves me a lot more time than slightly faster rendering.

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