Opera Claims Performance Gains Over Firefox Quantum
Less than three months after the initial release of Firefox Quantum, Opera is claiming that its latest browser is even faster.
“In Opera 51, you will see performance gains on benchmark tests such as the new Speedometer 2.0,” Opera’s Krystian Kolondra claims. “We challenged Opera 51 to a speed test against the latest Mozilla Firefox 58. The result: Opera is 38 percent [faster] than Firefox.”
As you may recall, Mozilla spent much of 2017 working on Firefox Quantum, a new generation of its flagship web browser that is designed to be faster and less resource-intensive as Chrome, the market leader. Mozilla shipped the first version of Firefox Quantum in November, and I liked it so much that I switched from Chrome a few weeks later. (And then switched back to Chrome again a few months later only because I needed to keep using Google’s browser for various reasons, and running two different browsers got tedious.)
Opera 51 could be interesting for many of the same reasons as Firefox Quantum—the performance, of course, but also other advantages that it has over Chrome. But the big thing here for me is that Opera uses the same rendering engine as Chrome (Chromium 64). So if that was an issue for anyone who tried Firefox previously, it may be worth looking at Opera. Which is sort of like Chrome with none of the Google tie-ins.
That said, I’m not necessarily a fan of some of the features that make Opera unique, like its integrated social networking functionality and the weird sidebar UI that it displays by default. Your needs and wants will, of course, be different.
You can try Opera 51 for yourself for free: It’s available now on Windows,Mac, Linux (deb), and Linux (RPM).