Opera 10.5 leaps to beta, holds on to unexpected performance lead

With a few builds under its belt now, it's clear that the development builds of Google Chrome 5 are resuming that browser's course of performance improvement at a rate, on our index, of about half a point per month. Our recent round of Windows 7-based browser tests show higher numbers across the board for another reason: Patch Tuesday has slowed down IE7 in Vista, our index browser, while giving a slight boost to IE8 in Win7.

So the fact that the latest stable build of Google Chrome 4 surged from under 20 to well over 21 on our index, is only partly due to a speed improvement. What's important with regard to these index figures is relative performance, and the bar graph will help you better visualize how well one browser compares with another.

The Opera 10.2 alpha track is no longer on our graph, because it's no longer on Opera Software's roadmap. That's probably a good thing, because 10.2 was the slowest browser in the line-up after IE8. The gulf between the current stable Opera 10.1 and the new 10.5 beta is unprecedented: a 370% performance improvement, mostly reflecting massively improved computational performance, and somewhat improved rendering performance.

In our tests, the 10.5 pre-alpha suffered from unexplained poor performance in rendering conventional HTML tables -- those tools that old Web pages used to divide and conquer pages, prior to the advent of CSS. That problem completely not only disappeared in the 10.5 beta, it blows away every other browser in the field in this department. On Win7, 10.5 scores a 9.19 -- 919% the performance of IE7 in Vista -- followed closely behind by an 8.80 score from the latest stable Safari 4, and 8.10 from Opera 10.1 (the opera brand has typically performed well on this test).

Relative SunSpider (general JavaScript computation) and SlickSpeed (CSS selector) test performance slid a bit from the pre-alpha to the first beta, but we expected that from the first official public build, with all the corrections developers needed to make. Table performance helped Opera 10.5 make up for that, and the new beta still holds the overall lead on the SunSpider: 69.57 versus 68.69 for Chrome 5, and 57.17 for the latest daily WebKit build of Safari.

And Opera's graphics rendering importance is unbelievable: Chrome 4 had us already whistling on the Canvas geography map rendering test, with a 31.75 score. Opera 10.5 Beta 1 scores a 63.50 on that same test.
Where Chrome 5 still holds an edge, including at times over its stable predecessor, is in ordinary page rendering. Chrome 5 scores an 11.49 in the Nontroppo CSS rendering battery, while Chrome 4 surpasses that with 12.05; Opera 10.5 Beta 1 scores 7.44 there. In the standard page load test from Nontroppo, Chrome 5 posts a staggering 16.27. Opera 10.5 is in second place on that scale, but still way behind at 9.99. That Chrome 5 score was so staggering, we tested several times to confirm it.

If Chrome 5 were to improve its handling of plotting graphics to the Canvas element of modern HTML, before Opera 10.5 improves its handling of everyday rendering, Opera could be in trouble. It's a tenuous situation at present for Opera, but let's face facts: It's the nicest tenuous situation that anyone at Opera Software last year could have asked for.

If you're one of those long-time Betanews commenters who has spent the last two years saying, look out guys, Opera is on a comeback...you have to be smiling now.