First public Opera 10.1 beta competes against its predecessor for performance

At a time when performance and speed are more important to browser users than ever before, and when Web apps users need the best platform available, suddenly it's Opera Software that is having the most difficult time delivering. While Opera 10's "Turbo Mode" is intended to leverage the company's pre-rendering capabilities originally designed for the Opera Mini mobile browser, none of that matters with respect to raw JavaScript performance; and these days, Web browsers are essentially JavaScript engines with some markup on the side.

Today, the first builds of Opera 10.1 that officially bear the "Beta 1" label were released to the company's servers. Betanews tests on this latest build were not very promising, as its overall CRPI score outperforms that of the latest stable Opera 10 by less than one percentage point. In fact, scores for the first public beta fell in Vista actually fell below those of the latest stable Opera 10 by about 7%.

Opera 10 Beta 1 scores a CRPI of 6.35, which compares to a 6.30 score for the stable Opera 10 (which we retested in Vista), and a 6.56 score for the last Beta 1 preview build we tested last week.

On both newer Windows platforms (Vista and Windows 7), Opera 10 Beta 1 tended to post slower rendering times than the stable version, with the exception being a slightly faster rendering score in XP (6.17 for Beta 1 versus 6.11 for Opera 10). On Vista, for some reason, the differences in the CSS rendering test are far more pronounced, in tests we repeated just to validate the results (6.46 in Beta 1 versus 8.81 in Opera 10, and yes, O10 is faster at rendering on Vista than XP).

And even in the CSS selectors test, where the previous beta preview builds had shown some nice gains, performance fell flat or below, with scores in XP and Windows 7 for Beta 1 falling below those for the stable build. The differences are not severe, though multiple browser users who have been spoiled in recent days by the hurdle-jumping contest between Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome may be disappointed by Opera essentially bringing up the rear.