Opera 9: the fat lady hasn’t sung yet

TechCrunch was the first to give me the news: Opera 9 has been released. So I downloaded and played with it a bit. Check out the built-in bittorrent support (slow, as Marshall notes). Tab preview and widgets are, well, cute. Not enough here yet to pull me away from Firefox, even though of late Firefox has been frequently slowing down for me. Maybe I have too many extensions installed.

But on to the one true test: the infamous Rat Race. In case you don’t recall, this little Ruby on Rails application injects ten crudely animated rats with AJAX amphetamines so you can watch them spasmodically race for the cheese. For a benchmark of how responsively a browser handles AJAX, we get these ravenous rodents worked up into a good lather and then attempt to yank the track right out from under them by navigating to another page. Opera 9 performed exactly the same as Opera 8 on this test, ranking second-best among browsers I tested, at 13 seconds to navigate away. Hey, at least they didn’t break anything. Firefox still reigns supreme, at only 5 seconds.

Yes, I know. The Rat Race only tests a very tiny subset of what’s important in a browser. But it provides me the wicked pleasure of wagging my finger at Internet Explorer and its bastard offspring Maxthon.