Opera 43 adds 'instant page loading', classic link selection

Opera Software has released Opera 43 to the stable channel with enhanced performance-boosting tools and a welcome productivity tweak.

Instant page loading is a pre-rendering technology which attempts to predict URLs as you type, and starts to load the site in the background before you even hit enter.

The feature has some intelligence, learning over time which URLs you type most often and loading those first.

Instant page loading also makes use of prerender tags, when they’re available (<link rel="prerender" href="/page/to/prerender">).

Opera 43 also takes advantage of Profile Guided Optimization, a powerful technique which enables the developer to "train" the compiler, identify key usage areas within the application and optimize them for size or speed.

The results seem worthwhile, with Opera reporting a 13 percent faster startup time. The browser engine has seen a performance boost, too, although the improvement depends very much on the benchmark you’re using: 60.3 percent according to Speedometer, 7.7 percent with JetStream and 3.35 percent according to Octane.

This may not be the end of the story. Profile Guided Optimization is a general compiler technology, not something specific to Opera, and it can be applied to any functions or modules which seem important. It’s entirely possible that we’ll see future optimizations in other areas.

If you’re more interested in what happens when you’re on a page, you’ll probably appreciate the classic link selection, which makes it easy to select text in a link without the browser registering your action as a click. Just click and drag horizontally and Opera will select the text rather than following the link.

Opera 43 is available now for Windows, Android, Linux and Mac.