Speaking for myself, I was pretty happy to notice that my old Athlon X2 4000+ Brisbane processor isn’t that slow as I expected, when compared to the much powerful Phenom II X4 940 – at least when it comes to rendering Web pages, since I have no doubt it will get a serious beating in various scenarios that involve a lot of multitasking!

These being said, I hardly wait to hear about your results! In my case, I only messed with Opera 10.60, Chrome 5 and IE 8, obtaining the following results: 4054, 3781, 548. These being said, the fastest Web browser on my computer is Opera, without a single doubt. Now, tell me about yours and make me upgrade my hardware even faster than I had in mind!

No, it’s not only one site, and today it’s not the first day when I see it happening. After some research, I bumped into the following solution: go to Settings> Preferences> Browsing, and then set the Loading option to “Redraw Instantly”. Some say it works, some say it doesn’t, and this error seems to occur in both Windows and Linux versions of the browser, probably in the Mac version, too, but I didn’t find any report on it yet.

The conclusion? In my case, changing that Loading option to “Redraw Instantly” solved the problem! I can only hope it will do the same for you or, even better, you’ll never have to face this issue. Final information for everyone’s use – it all happened in Windows XP SP3 Professional, running Opera 10.51, build 3315, the 32-bit version. That’s all, folks!

Is Opera world’s fastest browser? Some tests say it is, and while I won’t go as far as running tests on it, I will only say this – I usually open up Opera with the pages I had last time in it, and we’re talking about over 40 of them, usually. Apart from eating up at least 300 MB of memory (371 as I write this), Opera moves pretty fast.

To be honest, sometimes it has some minor issues with various sites, for example Gmail. Lately, I’ve seen Gmail freezing all of a sudden, while the rest of my pages were working properly, and the Opera browser window was extremely responsive. The solution? I close the tab, open it again, and that’s all!

The builtin RSS Reader and BitTorrent client can prove to be quite useful, but I can only tell you this – I am not a RSS freak, but when I used this part of Opera, it worked as expected, while I can’t say the same about the BitTorrent downloader. Why? Almost every time I use it, I end up with my browser crashing down, sooner or later, so my advice would be to avoid using it, at least for now.

Speed Dial is a great feature – don’t forget that Firefox users still need to install some addons to have access to similar goodies, so be sure to use it!

Session Management can also save your day if you do it properly, so no matter if you set Opera to open where you left last time, be sure to save a session with all pages you have open from time to time. You never know when misfortune can strike…

Blocking content with Opera doesn’t require any addon – just right click the add and then choose Block Content, or define rules manually by going to Tools>Advanced>Blocked Content! (be careful, sometimes you may run into trouble by blocking content; for example, I blocked GoDaddy ads, and when I try to change my DNS settings in there, the popup allowing me to do that doesn’t load…)

Last item on my Opera browser survival guide today is the feature some love, some hate, and others ignore, namely mouse gestures. I gave you the link, study that page, maybe even print it, and once those gestures become as normal as breathing, you’ll be saving a lot of your precious time with Opera.

That’s all for now, I hope you’ll find at least some of the above useful, and be sure we’ll get back to Opera, because now we only scratched the surface a bit. Have a nice weekend!