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Speed improvements for Mac

March 24, 2010 · by Anders Markussen

We spent some time tweaking performance on some of the Peacekeeper tests, and preliminary testing shows a 25% improvement on the Mac platform. This is in addition to the general speed improvements in 10.51. And good news for PPC-people; we finally ported the crashlogger, so start submitting logs so we can get to work on improving stability!

Known Issues
  • Some Carakan stability problems
  • Some stability problems on PPC
  • Fonts may appear thinner on some systems
  • Crashlogger doesn’t work for OS 10.4 ‘Tiger’

WARNING: This is a development snapshot: things can go horribly wrong if you don’t backup before running it.

Download

Changelog
  • Increased version number to 10.52
Mac
  • PPC crash logger
  • Drawing fonts changed from ATSUI to low level functions.
Core
  • Upgraded Presto/2.5.22 to Presto/2.5.24 (small tweaks for site-compatibility)
  • Various site-compatibility tweaks for Carakan

Readers' comments

Comments left by My Opera members under the original post: the first 50, as archived.

  • AnuaR Sh24. March 2010, 09:28

    > 16000 on Peacekeeper?! Oo
  • Kyle Baker24. March 2010, 09:30

    nice!
  • Sandolf24. March 2010, 09:35

    I should buy a Mac! :D
  • Peter Popov24. March 2010, 09:41

    You should :yes:
  • CoolHand24. March 2010, 09:43

    Cool, another day, another joy with Opera !

    :cool:
  • kimyu9224. March 2010, 09:45

    Originally posted by InDigazzZ:

    > 16000 on Peacekeeper?! Oo


    cool!:up:
  • Martin Rauscher24. March 2010, 09:57

    Originally posted by InDigazzZ:

    > 16000 on Peacekeeper?! Oo


    *grml* wants Windows version...

    But who cares about benchmarks anyway :wink:
  • DaleCooper66624. March 2010, 09:57

    still can't play sporcle, can you?
    all snapshots are crashing on my favourite mind-games site
  • SteveKong24. March 2010, 10:08

    Wow, just 51 points in peacekeeper to go and Safari will be outperformed on my system for the first time ever.

    Anyway, can anybody explain what's the point about drawing fonts with Core Graphics?
  • SteveKong24. March 2010, 10:15

    Bug: Chinese an Japanese chars show up as squares. (DSK-289976)
  • quark24. March 2010, 10:17

    And it still destroyes sessions/autosave.win on first launch. Bad Opera!
  • Daniele24. March 2010, 10:20

    Great Job! Previous mac snapshot was related to stability, this one speed...i hope hope next will have some UI/skin improvements! p:
    After that you could give us an rc and finally a final release! :D
  • Olli24. March 2010, 10:30

    3600 points in Safari 4.0.5 and this build. Are both the same for me :D

    @AnuaR Sh
    Mac Pro? :D
  • endless love24. March 2010, 10:31

    :up:
  • Pitiphong Phongpattranont24. March 2010, 10:32

    Oh my font is changed, What is the previous default font in Opera?

    PS. My Thai language is also squares too
  • Mark Gillespie24. March 2010, 11:10

    Originally posted by Sandolf:

    I should buy a Mac! :D



    Make sure it does what you want it to do thou. Most of the stuff I do on a PC, I can't do on Mac. A Mac is very good at a small amount of things. (office/web/mail/graphics desgin). Outside those, then you may fall foul of having to use a PC...

    Looking to give a Windows 10.52 / Presto 2.5.24 a spin, as Google Streetview rarely works for me.
  • oso79de24. March 2010, 11:27

    Scrolling is still a pain in the a**. I activated "Smooth Scrolling" but it's still soooo fast. When I scroll on my Magic Mouse I'm almost down the page in one go. Of course I can adjust the scroll speed in system preferences but then other applications scroll too slow. Maybe this can be fixed? Anyone else experiencing this?

    Mac OS X 10.6.2 with Magic Mouse

    P. S.: The same with my old Mighty Mouse.
  • peterp-sun24. March 2010, 11:53

    1) google streetview still crashes
    2) gesture above Opera window (i. e. open new tab) while in another app still does not bring focus to Opera (+ address bar for new tab)
    3) autosave.win is overwritten on launch (but I got used to saving my sessions before trying out new builds of 10.5x)

    ... and a couple of others I've submitted some time ago and just can't keep resubmitting them over and over =)

    Oh and btw, ATOM/RSS feed for this blog is delayed by like half a day in my reader [Opera =)] - my best bet is to go directly to my.opera.com/... Any idea WHY? (got checks set for 3 hours for this feed, plus manual refresh of feeds NOW still does not show this article)
  • SteveKong24. March 2010, 11:56

    Can anyone confirm that the scroll marker doesn't show up if it's activated?

    Edit: web.de's "news zoom" working again! :up:
  • Daniele24. March 2010, 12:00

    OMG! So Close! :yikes:


    Safari:4076
    Opera: 3960
  • Tmelon24. March 2010, 12:12

    Still doesn't work at all.... Great...
  • Wade24. March 2010, 12:16

    sometimes fonts upper half are missing for me. I have to scroll the screen up & down to get them to show correctly. using mac 10.6.2
  • Tim24. March 2010, 12:35

    Originally posted by Wade:

    sometimes fonts upper half are missing for me.


    I have this too, I've uploaded a screenshot of the issue here: http://i.imgur.com/vryiO.png .

    I also have the thin font 'issue' but personally I think everything looks nicer that way.
  • Wade24. March 2010, 13:15

    Originally posted by Fetimo:

    I have this too, I've uploaded a screenshot of the issue here: http://i.imgur.com/vryiO.png .


    dude thats really bad...reddit is not working for me at the moment :frown:
  • Espenher24. March 2010, 13:47

    I have the font rendering issues as well. It is so bad that I had to revert to the last snapshot. Oh well, guess I'll have better luck next time =)
  • Leo24. March 2010, 13:58

    Nice imrpovements !

    Does the PPC version come with JIT JS as well ? Or is the new JS engine x86-only ?
  • AnuaR Sh24. March 2010, 14:07

    Guys, it was just a suggestion:-D

    10.51 for Windows scored >13000 in Peacekeeper, and based on the author's words "preliminary testing shows a 25% improvement on the Mac platform. This is in addition to the general speed improvements in 10.51." - suggested that the Mac version is gaining a little more than 16000...
  • furue24. March 2010, 14:18

    Literally always crashes. Invoke Opera with speed dial. Click on any of the speed-dial items. Opera crashes within several seconds. 100% of the time. Does anybody see this?

    Mac OS 10.4, PowerBook G4 (PPC).

    Ryo
  • Dustin Wilson24. March 2010, 14:18

    What about crashlogger crashes? If Opera crashes and the crashlogger appears and you hit cancel or simply close the window it goes into an infinite loop of repetitive crashes until you send the crash report. When you do that you can go take a nap and come back and Opera still hasn't opened back up. I get this problem on both Intel and PPC.

    Still, it's impossible to click on anything on the cnn.com page without disabling javascript. Middle-clicking on links to open a background tab oddly enough works while regular left clicking does not. I've tested this with the Intel and PPC builds, along with the latest Windows build. I've also had others test this for me and have had it confirmed, but oddly enough not everyone experiences this problem.

    In addition it's impossible to log into deviantart.com using Opera 10.5. It wasn't always this way with 10.5 builds, but I can't remember precisely which build started this issue. Works just fine in 10.1.

    I hope the thinner text rendering is temporary. Problems with it are immediately prevalent by viewing how the white text on red in the menu at the top of this page renders before and after the change. Ew.
  • Kamalesh24. March 2010, 14:48

    Yes, lot of artifacting on fonts; scrolling seems to correct it somewhat, but hopefully you can tweak your API calls to Core Animation...if that's the problem. :wink:

    No problems at CNN.
    (v10.6.2-intel)
  • Daniel James Hendrycks24. March 2010, 15:10

    Originally posted by desktopteam:

    Increased version number to 10.52


    Nice, more bug fixes for Windows to come. :up:
  • mrelwood24. March 2010, 15:13

    BUG:
    If the Opera window covers the whole screen (the green + button), text and images are scrambled when scrolling the view. I think the lowest section of the window is not drawn. Happens with both trackpad scrolling (MacBook) and arrow keys. Smooth scrolling makes it even worse.

    Making the window a bit smaller the bug disappears.
  • mmpietro24. March 2010, 15:18

    The main banner in the Star Wars home page is troubled. The images are cropped. The interactive banner is not showed properly. But in Opera 10.10 it works perfectly.

    Watch out, Opera !
  • dennisdotse24. March 2010, 15:49

    damn. it closed all my active tabs :frown: guess I should learn to read the text in huge red letters..

    anyways, mouzegestures directly on tabs still triggers the contextmenu, opera still uses quite a long time to shut down (I've turned off disk caching - could this have something to do with it?) and there's still a weird line (≈90 x 5px) appearing between the tab bar and the address bar. it's really hard to get a screenshot of it because it suddenly disappears when I do something (don't know what)
  • Dave24. March 2010, 16:03

    Crashes immediately. I am unable to open any page.
    Crash log submitted.
    OSX 10.4.11 PPC

    DSK-290095
  • finnmich24. March 2010, 16:21

    It still crashes everytime i go to any page on digg.com
    This has been an issue for me since the first 10.50 snapshot, so I guess you have all my crashreports :smile:
  • Adrian24. March 2010, 16:29

    Crashes on open, and icon gets stuck in dock with light as if it is running. Only way to remove is with a logout/restart.
    10.5.8 PPC

    Edit: Got it to start with a blank speed dial, but it then crashes as above upon loading pages, including any opera:* pages. Disabling javascript didn't work
  • Mark Gillespie24. March 2010, 18:07

    Originally posted by DanielHendrycks:

    Nice, more bug fixes for Windows to come.



    We have been getting Windows bug fixes since 1996 and Opera 1.0, what made you think Opera 10.51 was the end of the road?
  • d4rkn1ght24. March 2010, 18:08

    :yes:
  • Daniel James Hendrycks24. March 2010, 18:25

    Originally posted by Mark Gillespie:

    We have been getting Windows bug fixes since 1996 and Opera 1.0, what made you think Opera 10.51 was the end of the road?


    I mean we will keep getting bug fix releases instead of going onto 10.6.
  • mmpietro24. March 2010, 19:00

    Yep. A lot of crashes ... like never before.
  • Maciej Tarmas24. March 2010, 21:19

    Noticeable speed improvement. The most apparent bugs still remain though:

    - the right-click menu and mouse gestures get disabled after visiting random sites that contain Flash
    - clicking the Opera dock icon doesn't maximize the window back after minimizing, you have to click the thumbnail
    - mouse gestures on the Speed Dial and tabs themselves invoke the right-click menu first and perform the gesture after the menu is dismissed
    - text area scrolling (even in this forum) is still broken, the text doesn't scroll past the hight of the box, even though the scrollbars show up and you can type further

    Opera hasn't crashed for me yet, but the reports above prove that the crash reporter still doesn't work.

    I'm glad that Opera is constantly improving, but the last Mac build is less than ready at this point.
  • Lucero Jr.24. March 2010, 23:04

    Thanks for the build!
  • evilcokemachine25. March 2010, 00:55

    Hmm, here at work Opera has crashed while using Meebo and some seemingly random times, but we use gubb.net, which crashes Opera immediately upon logging in. I doubt any of you guys use gubb.net, but who knows...
  • fabri25. March 2010, 01:29

    can confirm, this release crashes every time that I do click on speeddial
    MacOS 10.5.8, PPC
  • karlosrocks25. March 2010, 01:42

    It'll be great to see some improvement on the sputnik test too
  • Idan Adar25. March 2010, 04:29

    Originally posted by Tarmas:

    clicking the Opera dock icon doesn't maximize the window back after minimizing, you have to click the thumbnail


    Strangely enough, Opera now follows Apple's HIG regarding the Dock icon behavior. That said, other applications does do otherwise, as did Opera. I hope they will revert this eventually, as it is now less comfertable than before.
  • Maciej Tarmas25. March 2010, 05:56

    Originally posted by YtseJam:

    Strangely enough, Opera now follows Apple's HIG regarding the Dock icon behavior.



    Oh, so does this mean that Apple is not following the HIG themselves? You can maximize Safari by clicking it's icon in the dock. The thing is that if you have multiple Safari windows minimized, clicking the icon in the dock only maximizes the window that was opened last, which is pretty stupid if you ask me, because I would expect it to maximize all Safari windows (useful if you use multiple monitors, like I do). Oh well, I guess Steve just knows better...
  • Dustin Wilson25. March 2010, 06:07

    Originally posted by YtseJam:

    Strangely enough, Opera now follows Apple's HIG regarding the Dock icon behavior.


    Actually to quote the HIG:

    Clicking an application icon in the Dock should always result in a window becoming active.


    The old behavior was the correct method. Reading more by following the link I provided would provide more detail, including specifics for this particular situation. I'd be hard pressed to believe Opera's intentionally made it behave like it does presently. I'm sure it's on queue for being fixed.
  • Kornel25. March 2010, 06:09

    it's still very slow (Mac OS X 10.6.2). Opera 10.10 and every other browser works a lot faster. sometimes I have to wait for it to load a page (I have a blank page for a long time) more than a minute, so it's a bit strange saying that Opera 10.52 is the fastest. :wink:

    BTW, thinner fonts look nice on some pages. :smile:

About this article

Published inDesktop Team blog
DateMarch 24, 2010
AuthorAnders Markussen
Tagsperformance, Peacekeeper, MAC
OriginalInternet Archive