Opera 10 Beta and Firefox 3.5 Beta 4

The new beta versions of Opera and Firefox have been released in the past week. And I'm very excited about them.

Firefox 3.5 claims to be 2x faster than 3.0 and 10x faster than 2.0. Those are huge claims considering 3.0 and 2.0 are already zipping along at a lightning pace.

Meanwhile, Opera 10 Beta using Webkit's Sun Spider tests, works out to be 16.2% faster than the current 9.62 stable release. Opera 10 Beta also includes a "Opera Turbo" feature which automatically detects slow networks and optimises your browsing speed by around 3x - 4x. This is done by Opera's own proprietary technology. This comes at a cost of low-res images at times though.

I decided to do some Acid3 standard tests* on both browsers and these were my results.

These were the results I got from the Opera 10 Beta. This is a perfect test and is the only browser to have a perfect score so far apart from the Safari Beta 4. (which was released around a month ago)

These are the results that I got from the Firefox 3.5 Beta. This is a good result but not perfect and does not comply to all the Acid3 standards.

In my opinion, its worth waiting for the stable release before judging/labelling each of these browsers and the Safari and Chrome releases are worth waiting for as well. However, the Firefox 3.5 version looks promising and as support for its add-ons grow, so does the popularity.

Opera are still trying to get their widgets to function effectively though as they are not allowed full control of the browser, which somewhat limits their capabilities.

I, for one, know I will be waiting anxiously for the next stable release of all the browsers mentioned above before making my mind on which to use as my default.

*Note: For a full list of what the Acid3 standards are, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3#Standards_tested