Opera 7 for Windows

Performance of Opera 7 for Windows

In both our official and informal tests, Opera 7 generally loaded HTML pages a mite faster than Netscape and slower than IE. We're not too surprised by this result. For reasons perhaps known only to Microsoft, no third-party browser has been able to catch up with IE's outstanding page-display speed. But in the race for second place, Opera held its own, and in most of our key HTML tests, it even managed to edge out Netscape 7.0.1. We were a bit disappointed in Opera's JavaScript execution times, but the rarity of lengthy, complex JavaScript code will ward off any serious delays in day-to-day use.

Some pages that rendered just fine in both Mozilla and IE, such as the MSN.com home page, didn't fare so well in Opera 7. Opera cut off text on some sections of the page, so you couldn't read the headlines properly. But this glitch probably isn't Opera's fault. A company representative pointed out that while Opera 7 supports Web standards, MSN.com intentionally feeds a different version of the page and style sheet to non-IE browsers. Hence, its pages don't always appear as they should.



We also encountered some multimedia functions that we didn't care for. Media that would normally display within a Web page instead popped open in a separate viewer. For example, when we tried to view one of the video stories on News.com, Opera 7 insisted on opening the video stream directly in a separate Windows Media Player window, rather than playing the video in a standard browser pop-up window. According to Opera, this procedure is actually an improvement over the last version's, given that CNET's own review of Opera 6 found that the browser had problems playing media files at all.

CNET Labs benchmarks
CNET Labs ran its speed benchmark tests using VeriTest's i-Bench 3.0. VeriTest makes no representations or warranties as to the result of the tests. Our i-Bench Web server was a Dell Dimension XPS B733r equipped with a 733MHz Intel Pentium III microprocessor and 384MB of RAM, running Windows 2000. Our client was a Toshiba Satellite 3005-5304 Notebook with a 1GHz Pentium III processor and 128MB of RAM, running Windows XP at a screen resolution of 1,024x768. iBench measures the relative performance differences between products and versions of products and is used by software engineers to see how code changes affect performance. Because connection speeds and user environments are so diverse, you may not experience the speed differences that we've measured in our high-speed tests.

In most of the i-Bench tests, Opera 7 performed on a par with Netscape 7 but lagged to a small degree in the Java Virtual Machine test and one XML/CSS load test. In the JavaScript, test it scored well behind both Netscape and IE. IE was considerably faster than the others at loading HTML pages.

i-Bench tests (All numbers are in seconds)

Netscape 7.01 average IE 6 average Opera 7 average HTML load speed All iterations 99.84 45.81 83.10 First iteration (downloaded) 13.65 7.57 11.88 Subsequent iteration (cached) 12.32 5.45 10.18 XML/CSS load speed All iterations 12.92 14.55 15.48 First iteration (downloaded) 0.79 1.10 1.02 Subsequent iteration (cached) 0.64 0.71 0.76   Java Virtual Machine 12.51 15.41 15.47   JavaScript 8.02 3.49 18.79

CaffeineMark 3.0 tests measure performance related to the browser's use of the Java Virtual Machine. Contrary to our findings in the i-Bench trials, Opera 7 performed on a par with Netscape and IE in handling Java according to CaffeineMark, scoring slightly higher overall. Each browser had particular tests in which it performed best. Pendragon Software's CaffeineMark 3.0 tests were run without independent verification by Pendragon Software, which makes no representations or warranties as to the results of the tests. For more information on what these scores mean, click here.

CaffeineMark 3.0

Netscape 7.01 average IE 6.0.2 SE average Opera 7 average Sieve 8569 12649 12968 Loop 25803 24230 24360 Logic 19723 18400 18421 String 29115 24737 24805 Float 24919 21193 21223 Method 21748 20897 20946 Graphics 6416 6380 6454 Image 2394 2340 2375 Dialog 639 817 831   Overall 9380 9690 9777