Is Opera a bad browser, or the worst browser?

[Kuciwalker]

Asher was never an IE fanboy, at least since Firefox came out.

[Hueij]

Asher was never an IE fanboy, at least since Firefox came out.

Hahahahahahaha!

How easy we forget...

[Asher]

Should I change my nick?

My point is that as long most people won't be able to see your fab HTML5 content, it's stupid to ***** about what browser is better.

I use HTML5 content daily.

That's the point. It's here, it's being used by millions -- particularly in the mobile sector, which is supposedly Opera's strong suit.

[Asher]

Asher was never an IE fanboy, at least since Firefox came out.

IE6 was far superior to Mozilla, Netscape 4.x, and Opera 5/6/7.

Heujajin has been an Opera fanboy since the thing came out. His loyalties remained with Opera as the seas changed in the browser markets many times.

Opera is and will always be irrelevant.

[SlowwHand]

Nope.

[Asher]

http://dotnetperls.com/chrome-memory

Browsers and their memory usages.

Chrome is by far the worst, Opera is 2nd worst.

Firefox was always the best in terms of low memory usage.

Chrome peaked at over 1.2 GIGABYTES of memory. Firefox peaked at 327MB, Opera at 554MB.
Chrome averaged 543MB, Firefox 166MB, Opera 347MB.


ALSO: I used another HTML5-enabled site today, Flickr...they have an awesome "photos taken near here" geolocation feature.

Opera does not support it.

Opera also does not support color profiles like Firefox, Safari, Chrome.

[Sirotnikov]

I still don't know enough technically but there has been criticism of their comparison method:

http://www.ghacks.net/2009/06/21/web-browser-memory-usage-benchmark-gets-it-all-wrong/

The results of the web browser memory usage benchmark were then divided into three chars displaying the maximum, average and final memory used by each of the tested web browsers. The Mozilla Firefox web browser used the lowest amount of computer memory of all tested web browsers while the Google Chrome browser showed very high maximum and average memory usage.

And here is where the tester got it wrong. To compute the memory usage all processes where taken into consideration which effectively meant double-counting the shared memory for each process. As the Chromium blog points out:

If you’re measuring memory in a multi-process application like Google Chrome, don’t forget to take into account shared memory. If you add the size of each process via the Windows XP task manager, you’ll be double counting the shared memory for each process. If there are a large number of processes, double-counting can account for 30-40% extra memory size.

To make it easy to summarize multi-process memory usage, Google Chrome provides the “about:memory” page which includes a detailed breakdown of Google Chrome’s memory usage and also provides basic comparisons to other browsers that are running.

Google Chrome’s result would still be higher than that of Firefox even after the adjustments but this is one of the trade-offs of a multi-process browser (which Google Chrome is). You would get the same result with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 if the tester would have tested that web browser as well. This was apparently not possible due to technical difficulties.

Another aspect that needs to be mentioned is the test result of the Opera web browser. Opera is using an automatic setting called Automatic RAM Cache that is enabled by default. This allocated about 10% of the computer memory by default and should be disabled in memory benchmarks. Opera would most likely still have been beaten by Firefox but the gap would probably have been lower.

[Sirotnikov]

also:

[Asher]

No matter how you slice it, Chrome uses more.

[onodera]

Nice, didn't know about automatic RAM cache. Thanks, Siro.

[ZEE]

.

[Asher]

Nice, didn't know about automatic RAM cache. Thanks, Siro.

The author of the blog is mildly retarded as Firefox has had the same feature since 2.0.

browser.cache.memory.capacity to change its size.

No idea where he got the idea that only Opera has a memory cache.

For a system with 4GB of RAM, as the tester, Firefox reserves 58MB for memory cache by default. That is included in the test. This is actually slightly more than Opera reserves.

[Imran Siddiqui]

This thread made me realize that I had installed a version of Opera as a backup browser a while back. So I decided to go on and uninstall that POS browser.

Thanks Asher

[Asher]

I have every browser possible installed on my work laptop (including IE6 & 7 via virtual PCs). When testing a major new website for my company, I was looking at how the pages rendered in all the browsers...there were some major bugs with Opera, but none of the others. I asked if we should fix them, and they laughed.

[Sirotnikov]

The author of the blog is mildly retarded as Firefox has had the same feature since 2.0.

browser.cache.memory.capacity to change its size.

No idea where he got the idea that only Opera has a memory cache.

For a system with 4GB of RAM, as the tester, Firefox reserves 58MB for memory cache by default. That is included in the test. This is actually slightly more than Opera reserves.

Author claims Opera always has it around 10% of available RAM (which is probably a crappy decision). I recall FF has steps, and they are smaller.