Yesterday, Opera 11.50 was released in its final form. To be honest, I didn’t expect much. Despite the fact I’m talking about my favorite browser here, I must admit that, starting around version 10, Opera went down for me – huge memory usage, frequent crashes, various issues with sites that worked well in any other browser… but now it seems all that has finally come to an end! As I write this, I have nothing but good words about Opera 11.50, so let’s take a quick look at the new things and improvements it brings, shall we?
The official Opera homepage shows a download count of over 10,300,000 that keeps growing at an alarming rate, I could say. Alarming for other browsers that keep going down with each new version, of course – no need to give you any names here, right? If you want to check all the improvements and new things in Opera 11.50 (for Windows), then you’d better go right here. For those who are not that curious, here’s what I think that really matters…
- Improved Opera Link: now, you can sync your passwords, too. While some may feel their privacy threatened, I think this is a great addition – after all, I am not planning any terror attacks, I don’t send or receive illegal pornographic materials via email… so I couldn’t care less if Obama himself will be checking my emails tomorrow morning. Sure, I also have some passwords to various blogs I own or write on, but those are not the kind of passwords to store in ANY browser.
- Speed/reliability improvements: I didn’t perform any synthetic benchmark yet and I can even dare to say that I’m not expecting any improvements there, but what really matters is memory usage and the amount of crashes I get. Since I upgraded, I had no crashes, while memory usage is much better than before – with 21 tabs open, I see Opera using 340 MB of physical memory and about 500 MB swap space. I know that doesn’t sound too good, but you don’t want to know how bad it was before!
- Speed Dial improvements: more customizable than before, now sporting Speed Dial extensions – “small web pages embedded in your Speed Dial powered by Opera’s extension framework” as described in the official changelog. Pretty cool, if you ask me.
Other than the above, there are plenty of minor fixes and improvements, but I think we covered the things that really matter already, so… that’s all of it, I guess. Enjoy Opera 11.50, people, because there’s a lot to enjoy, trust me!
I have been using Opera since version 5 (2001) and it is/was the best browser out there. Fast, clean and very innovative. Many of the features that are now common in IE, Firefox and Chrome started with Opera!
However, since version 9 the memory usage keeps on increasing. Also with 11.50 it initially uses 200mb and can reach 800mb when opening 10 tabs. Opening the same 10 tabs show the following
757mb – Opera 11.5
445mb – FireFox 5.0
282mb – IE 9
It’s time for an lite edition of Opera
Try disabling Opera Unite.
With 10 tabs open, I get about 420 MB of memory used by Opera 11.50 – pretty cool, considering that older versions were worse, at least for me. Sure, I can’t deny the fact that you are right – Opera Lite sounds like a great idea!
Also you can try to change Memory Cache(Preferences/Advanced/History), from automatic to manual. If it’s automatic, Opera try to occupy a lot of RAM.
But it’s natural, we should not expect lower memory consumption from new browsers coming.
For me the best Opera was version 7.