Opera releases first version of Chromium-based browser
The Norwegian company behind the web browser Opera has released a first version of its renewed browser, which has a new render engine and a new javascript engine. Opera is now based on Chromium.
The preview version of Opera 15, dubbed ‘Next’ by Opera, has been out since Monday to download for Windows and OS X. The increase in version number – the previous major version still had version number 12 – isn’t the only major change: that’s the underlying render engine. Opera 15 is based on Chromium, the open source project that makes up the bulk of Chrome’s code.
This means, among other things, that Opera 15 has the Blink engine, a fork of the Webkit project. In addition, the new Opera version has Google’s V8 javascript engine on board. The Mozilla benchmark Kraken 1.1 seems to indicate that the new version is much faster: it takes only a quarter of the time on the benchmark, which focuses on current and future web technologies. At Peacekeeper, the new version scores considerably better than the previous version, and surprisingly also better than the last stable version of Google Chrome.
Opera previously indicated that it had chosen Chromium to free up manpower for the implementation of new features: developing its own render engine would cost too much money. Opera is the fifth largest browser in size, after Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. The four largest browsers all have their own engine, although Chrome has only had its own engine since the fork of Webkit, which is also used by Safari and many mobile browsers.
Another change in Opera 15 is that the mail client is no longer included: it is now a separate program. In addition, the necessary interface changes have been made, including in the design of the tabs, which now look a lot cleaner. There is also a new speed dial menu and Opera has introduced the stash, where web pages can be stored temporarily, for example for research.
| Chrome 27 |
** 2967 ms. |
| Firefox 21 |
**3293ms. |
| Opera 15 |
*** 3615 ms. |
| Internet Explorer 10 |
****** 8442 ms. |
| Opera 12.15 |
********* 13750 ms. |
Tested under Windows 8 with an Intel Core i3 and 4GB of internal memory.
| Opera 15 |
********* 3273 |
| Chrome 27 |
********* 2858 |
| Opera 12.15 |
******* 2260 |
| Firefox 21 |
****** 1870 |
| Internet Explorer 10 |
***** 1630 |
Tested under Windows 7 with an Intel Core i5 and 4GB of internal memory.