Opera Responds to Challenges from Open Source Browsers

Recently, when I’ve written about the performance leapfrogging going on between the Firefox and Chrome open source browsers, many people have written in in the comments about how all the benchmark results going on around the web tend to leave Opera out. Opera has always had its own fiercely loyal set of fans, but there actually have been some recent benchmark face-offs including it, and it was starting to look like Opera is falling behind.

For example, the alpha version of Opera 10 is much slower than other browsers in ZDNet Australia’s recent benchmarks. However, I just got an e-mail from the folks at Opera, and it’s clear that a big performance boost is squarely on their radar. Meanwhile, Google Chrome is currently undergoing a major under-the-hood overhaul. Here are the details.

The folks at Opera saw my recent post here on WWD about how the open source browsers are pulling so far ahead in benchnmark tests, and e-mailed me with details on what they have in the works:

“Opera just announced its newest JavaScript engine Carakan. Opera developers and testers have been working on this for the past few months and aim to make it the fastest JavaScript engine on the planet, much like its predecessor Futhark. We are expecting some stunning performance improvements because Carakan is already 2.5 times faster than the JavaScript engine in Opera 10 (Futhark). When the engine is ready to go, there could be a much higher performance boost.”

They also pointed me to this blog post about Carakan. Sure enough, it looks like JavaScript performance is squarely what Carakan is aimed at, and that’s exactly the area where the beta versions of Firefox 3.1 and where Google Chrome have been seriously outperforming other browsers. The Opera post is worth reading, especially if you like the browser and want it to stay competitive.

Meanwhile, even though Google Chrome has been winning many Javascript performance tests, Google is completely swapping out third-party software under the hood in favor of the company’s own. You can find out about this on the Chromium blog where developers discuss replacing regexp software in its Javascript engine with Irregexp, software written at Google. The goal is to jack up Javascript performance even more.

You can get the new developer preview version of Chrome 2.0 160.0 here.  As always, you must subscribe to Google’s Developer Preview channel to get these developer updates, and you may not want them for stability reasons. However, if you want to tinker with the types of speed improvements Chrome developers are shooting for, this is your first opportunity.

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