Opera Unite First Hands On – Web Reinvented?
Does the internet feel different this morning? Apparently it should. Today Opera took the wraps off its newest web browser, Opera Unite. For those not familiar with Opera, it is a web browser that has recently made its name with the increase in popularity of Opera Mobile / Mini. Opera is also the engine powering the Nintendo Wii and DSi web browsers. While their client software for mobile devices and game consoles has gained popularity, their desktop browser seems to have fallen off the map a bit. Apple’s Safari is fast as ever, Firefox continues to get better, and even IE isn’t half bad anymore. Throw Google Chrome into the mix, and the browser market may be too crowded for Opera. Click on to find out!
I grabbed today’s Alpha release of Opera tonight for Mac OS X. The first thing I noticed was that the address bar / tab bar / navigation portion of the browser is slightly slimmer than that of Safari. For those on a large 2048×1152 monitor like myself, that might not matter, but for someone with a smaller 13″ MacBook screen, the extra real estate is appreciated. The status bar on the bottom, however, is slightly thicker than Safari’s so I suppose they use the same amount of screen for their tools.
Thin, Classy Navigation Bar
Next up, I fired up the Acid3 test. The Acid3 test is designed to check how well a web browser follows the latest web standards. It scored 100/100. Not too shabby! Safari 4 scores 100/100 as well, but the latest version of Firefox only brings in 72/100. Next up in the battery of tests was the SunSpider javascript speed test. This test measures the pure javascript speed of the browser. I didn’t bother to test Firefox, but here are the Opera Unite v. Safari 4 results:
SunSpider JavaScript Performance - Opera Unite v. Safari 4
| Test | Safari | Opera | Dif |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3d | 424.8 | 570.4 | 1.34x |
| access | 191 | 847.2 | 4.44x |
| bitops | 83.4 | 726.4 | 8,71x |
| controlflow | 6.2 | 86.8 | 14x |
| crypto | 104.4 | 345.2 | 3.31x |
| date | 73 | 320.4 | 4.39x |
| math | 288.8 | 480.6 | 1.66x |
| regexp | 44 | 145 | 3.3x |
| string | 251.6 | 1387.2 | 5.51x |
So based on those tests, we can already see that this browser is no screamer. It’s significantly slower than Safari 4 in EVERY single javascript test it took. After getting some of the tests out of the way, I spent a day using it as my primary web browser, just to see how it held up in daily usage.
At the end of the day, I don’t have anything awful to say about it. Pages loaded fairly quickly, and while most sites loaded normally, there were a few rendering abnormalities. I noticed GMail performance was not quite as snappy as on Safari, and when I went to United.com to request an upgrade for some travel I have coming up, that page didn’t render properly either. So nothing was noticeably better than Safari / Firefox, and a few things were noticeably worse. What’s the point?
Bad rendering. Baaaad rendering.
So there was one last thing I was curious about. Even though it’s clear that I would never use this browser as a daily workhorse, I was curious about some of the features mentioned on the Opera corporate blog. Their premise is that not only is a web browser a “dumb terminal” for receiving information, but that it should also act as a “web server” of sorts and people should be able to create applications based around their Opera Unite services. I suppose it’s an interesting theory, but in my opinion, we have web browsers for browsing, and servers for serving. Call me old fashioned. Time to throw Opera Unite in the trash.
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