14 DAY TRIAL // While the browser space is currently dominated by Google Chrome, with Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox serving as the most popular alternatives, there are several other solid choices out there in the market.
Including Opera, that is, as the browser comes with a very rich feature package, including a built-in VPN that allows users to remain anonymous when browsing the web.
The first update of the year, however, wasn’t focused on new capabilities but on under-the-hood improvements that made the browser significantly faster.
Opera says the application is now 16 percent faster when rendering web pages and handling requests, as well as 14 percent faster when it has to handle graphics.
The company explains that it focus on three main areas to make Opera faster, namely build optimizations, link time optimizations, and engine settings tweaks.
“We’ve enabled maximum link time optimization. Link Time Optimization (LTO) is a form of interprocedural optimization (IPO), which aims to improve performance in programs that contain many small but frequently used functions. The way LTO is implemented allows these optimizations to cover all the different parts of the program as a single module, which results in better performance,” Opera says.
“We have improved out-of-process 2D canvas rasterization in our out-of-process rendering, which moves all rendering tasks to the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit, also known as your graphics card). This helps lighten the load for the CPU, which can keep your system running more smoothly,” the company continues.
To measure the impact of all these optimizations, Opera was put to test with Speedometer and Motionmark, two benchmarks that proved that all the work managed to make the browser significantly faster.
The faster browser is already available for all users out there, so make sure you are running the latest build of the app to benefit from the speed upgrade.