Questions about Opera browser....

[edmicman]

I'm trying out Opera here, and some of its pretty cool. Theres a lot about it that I think is pretty neat. Not sure if its worth paying for though, since NS and IE are both free. But a couple things are bothering me. On their webpage the big selling thing is that its smaller and faster than the competition. Well, the speed thing does seem good - I have to try it at home on the 56k to see if theres much difference, but things seem pretty snappy here at work. But the size thing...I'm running win2k and according to task manager opera is using almost 40mb of memory - which is almost 4 times as the instance of IE I'm running! Plus, opera seems to sap the CPU whenever it loads a page for an extended period of time. Is this normal?? If so, it may be cool, but it seems a bit of a memory hog, moreso than other browsers. BTW I'm running v6.04. Also, it renders some pages as crap, which I guess should be expected. And it doesn't even work to navigate the MSDN pages. Some some thoughts. Anyone else?

 

[Nothinman]

But the size thing...I'm running win2k and according to task manager opera is using almost 40mb of memory - which is almost 4 times as the instance of IE I'm running!

Perhaps they mean disk-space size, I don't use it so I'm not totally sure. But you have to take into account that IE's memory usage is shared with the rest of the shell because MS uses IE's HTML renderer all over the place.

Also, it renders some pages as crap, which I guess should be expected

Write those web masters and tell them to fix their pages.

And it doesn't even work to navigate the MSDN pages. Some some thoughts. Anyone else?

You think MS wants you using something other than IE?

 

[joinT]

i think Nothinman cleared things up good~! 😉

 

[n0cmonkey]

Mozilla is eating 40MB of ram right now too. IE is eating 43M, 10M, and 10M on my system. I dont have Opera installed on this machine so I cant compare it.

 

[jackwhitter]

IE does grab resources from all about windows, so a direct comparison, isn't as fair... try looking at the amount of free ram before running either one, and then comparing that with the end result. also, i've had opera eating as much as 100megs of ram when i open 10 - 15 windows... just a lot of stuff. i use opera nearly exclusively (except for those coded especially for IE **cough** msn **coush**)

i've noticed the cpu hog, too.. if you lessen opera's priority in win2k that helps.. doesn't really affect opera, but allows your other programs to function normally. my favorite thing about opera is that it tells you what it's doing.. ie, trying to connect to server, connected, waiting for response, etc.. instead of IE, look, i'm busy doing something (i'm too smart to let u know.)...

 

[Sunner]

The memory hog thing is caused by Opera's caching mechanism I believe.

 

[edmicman]

cool, thanks guys. i guess it seems like most modern browsers are mem hogs then. the more i play with opera, the more cool things i find about it. it'd be nice to get some competition to IE in the marketplace. i still do'nt quite understand why they're charging for an ad free version though - it doesn't yet seem to blow away the competition enough to warrant spending money. i really like the tabbed window thing...i thought that was cool with the new mozilla and netscape, except those seem to take forever to load up at first. i'll have to give MS and IE that - by integrating it into the OS the load time is VERY much faster than the others. I'm not sure if any competition will be able to compete with that, even by "pre-loading" the software.

 

[Nothinman]

i really like the tabbed window thing...i thought that was cool with the new mozilla and netscape, except those seem to take forever to load up at first.

There's a quickload feature (not sure of the exact wording) that loads Mozilla when you login so it starts as quick as IE when you go to open a new window.

If you have a 3+ button mouse tabbed browsing rocks even more, just middle click to open in new tab and middle click on a tab to close it.

 

[spyordie007]

Originally posted by: Sunner
The memory hog thing is caused by Opera's caching mechanism I believe.

Part of the reason it is faster is because it cashes a portion of your "temporary internet files" in RAM rather than on the HD, I dont have time to look now but I believe there is a setting for it in the prefs that allows you to adjust how much physical RAM it can use for the cashe.

-Spy

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: spyordie007

Originally posted by: SunnerThe memory hog thing is caused by Opera's caching mechanism I believe.

Part of the reason it is faster is because it cashes a portion of your "temporary internet files" in RAM rather than on the HD, I dont have time to look now but I believe there is a setting for it in the prefs that allows you to adjust how much physical RAM it can use for the cashe.-Spy

Yeah I know, though I usually turn that off, since I don't see much use in it when Im on a fast enough connection, it's only useful if you're on a slow link IMO.

 

[spyordie007]

Originally posted by: Sunner
it's only useful if you're on a slow link IMO.

It doesnt matter how fast your internet connection is, there's no chance that it's as fast as accessing directly out of memory. I havent been using Opera much lately, however I would set it fairly low, but still have enough for things like icons on Anandtech so they could just load out of memory.

-Spy

 

[Sunner]

I didn't mean it was as fast as loading from memory, I was more talking about the point of diminishing returns.

I really don't care if it takes .01 seconds to load, or .5 seconds, or even 2-3 seconds, as long as it doesn't take 5-10 or more, which it never does on any sites i visit frequently.

When I was on 56K though, most sites took ~10 seconds or more to load, and thats where caching rocked.