Opera Web Browser 11.5

Opera has come back with its latest web browser version 11.5, which is basically the upgrade of Opera 11.1. Featuring an improved UI, the new browser has come back with the speed dials, which they introduced in Opera web browser 4 only to discard it in successive upgrades. The web page allows you to stack numerous speed dials at a time, where you can put your favourite websites for instant access, just like Chrome.

Turbo makes it faster

Accessing a website is quite fast and when you are running Opera Turbo, you can save up on the data consumed in rendering heavy websites that Turbo compresses. Google Chrome does have something of this sort and is called Google Web accelerator. But Opera does a better job, it supports HTML5 and so can run websites that are compatible with HTML5. Other factors which make Opera 11.5 faster is the use of hardware acceleration --processing is done through graphics card and not through CPU, since GPU is better at depicting graphics on a webpage than CPU.

Cleaner and user friendly browser

Opera 11.5 looks cleaner and lighter with very few buttons, including a hidden panel button on the left bottom that showcases your bookmarks, widgets, notes, history, etc. Click on the hidden panel button and a column of icons will appear. Adjacent to the panel button lies the buttons for Opera Turbo, Opera Unite and Opera Link. When turbo mode is on, it shows before the address bar in blue colour. Click on it, and you will know how much data it saved while browsing. An interesting feature in the browser is the option to open a private tab alone, which you won't find in other browsers like Chrome 12 and Firefox 5. You can open more than twenty tabs at a time and works without any hiccups. The browser comes with tabs stacking feature where you can stack the tabs on either side of the webpage. Stacking on left or right side of the webpage looks more tidy and organized.

Search your files faster

Opera 11.5 has assigned all search engines with a one letter keyword like 'g' for Google, 'B' for Bing, etc. To look for something on Google, type 'G' and the keywordword in the address bar. You can also search through the search bar, adjacent to the address bar. In the search bar, just type the keywordword and a whole lot of search options, followed by any previous searches of the same word will be provided. All this makes searching for files in Opera 11.5 exciting and user friendly. It saves a webpage on the cache and can be opened in other browsers from the Opera browser itself --a feature that is lacking in other browsers.

Performance

We tested the latest version of the browser on two online benchmarks. First is the Acid 3 to test a web browser's ability to render a web page accurately. Second is the Sunspider 9.1 Javascript benchmark for measuring Javascript performance of a web browser. We ran the same benchmarks on three browsers --Firefox 5, Chrome 12 and Internet Explorer 9 and found Opera 11.5 leaving them behind in the Acid 3 benchmark, registering a score of 100 out of 100, whereas, Internet Explorer 9 scored 95, Chrome 12 got 97 and Firefox 5 scored 94. In Sunspider, Chrome 12 led with 287.2 ms, followed by Internet Explorer 9 with 265 ms, Opera 11.5 with 252.5ms, and Firefox managed 237.5ms.

Bottomline: Impressive in its new avatar, Opera 11.5 is much better than its preceding versions and other popular browsers in many ways.