Good news for users who open dozens of tabs in their browsing sessions. Loading that much content at once can cause the browser to take a minute (or more) to do its job, but Opera announces that the new version 41 is 86 percent faster than its predecessor, while with just twelve tabs the increase is already above 50 percent. Will that be enough for us to switch browsers? There's only one way to find out…
Opera's overall situation hasn't changed. Considering all its desktop versions, its market share barely exceeds two percent. Several statistics sites no longer even list the browser as an "independent measurement", but instead place its values within the "Other" category. The adoption of Chromium technology didn't improve the situation much, and many users out there have doubts about Opera's new owners, the Chinese security company Qihoo 360, which recently came into conflict with Mozilla over a SHA-1 certificate issue. While all that "flood" of water flows under the bridge, a new version of Opera has just entered the arena, and it comes with important changes when it comes to speed.
According to official information, Opera 41 is equipped with a much more efficient startup sequence that can cut loading time in half compared to Opera 40. The demonstration in the video loads twelve tabs, but the difference is even greater if we increase the number of open pages. In a case we might consider "extreme", a 42-tab session takes 63.5 seconds in Opera 40, and with Opera 41 the time drops to 8.6 seconds, an effective improvement of 86 percent. Additionally, there's longer battery life in video conferences, hardware acceleration for video pop-outs, and optimizations in the news section.
Beyond this notable increase in startup speed, Opera still hasn't managed to smooth out certain rough edges (for example, the video pop-up is quite finicky), nor avoid policies that don't benefit the user, starting with the (apparent) impossibility of removing the preinstalled search engines or changing its keyboard shortcuts. The process requires a rather unpleasant hack in the installation files, so we hope those in charge change their minds. Opera undoubtedly offers a different vision of Chromium technology, and in some aspects it already surpasses the base version, but work on browsers never ends.
