Opera version 9.6 has just been released. I won't bother listing all the updates and additions since that's available on opera.com, but what I wanted to mention is the SPEED. Thus far, I had stuck with browsers that use IE's engine simply because of how fast it was. Firefox and Opera always seemed much slower to me. Now with 9.6, Opera is a speed demon! Page load times have dramatically decreased, so for those of you who haven't tried Opera, or have switched to something else, now is a great time to give the latest version a try!

I've been using it since this morning (UK time). Not sure yet if it's faster than 9.52, but it certainly isn't any slower.

I didn't notice a speed difference either from 9.52. Some one who has not use Opera since before the 9.5 release will be very surprised though with the speed increase from previous versions of Opera. Opera 9.5+ is very fast compared to anything under 9.5.

does it finally work for vista 64X ?

Yep. I don't think it's any faster, at least not very much.

It sounds like Tejay3800 hasn't used Opera in a while and in that case it doesn't surprise me that he finds 9.60 fast. There has been a huge speed increase since the 9.50 version compared to previous versions that he was using.

You're right, I hadn't used it in several months...since version 9.27 or so. Maybe the speed difference started with version 9.5 and not 9.6, but I think my recommendation is still valid. It's a remarkably fast browser!

http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2008/10/09/obama

Modified version: http://img56.imageshack.us/img56/4048/barackoperahg7.jpg

That Don't Impress Me Much

It does not support McAfee SiteAdvisor nor Web of Trust ( WoT )

That's true, but Opera's Fraud Protection protects against malware sites too. At least against some of them.

http://www.opera.com/docs/fraudprotection/

Protection against malware Web sites is also part of Opera Fraud Protection.

I'm currently testing Opera 9.60 Portable. I don't see much improvement in terms of performance compared to Firefox Portable 3.1b2pre.

Thats because they are both very fast.

I already mentioned this to Kenny on a different forum, but for the benefit of anyone who may read this, WOT has a bookmarklet for Opera and Safari that works very nicely.

http://www.mywot.com/en/blog/wot-bookmarkl...afari-and-opera

Well, I guess it will be a tough time choosing the one to keep. I always thought Opera would always be faster than Firefox without the help of benchmarks. Now I don't see the difference in the naked eye.

why do you think you need to get rid of one? Keep both. I have FF2 and 3, Opera 9.60, Maxthon 1 and 2, Avant, and IE7 with IE 7 Pro on my machines. I keep up on all of them.

I agree with Anthony. I use Opera almost exclusively now, but if I want to download a large (1gb ish) file, I launch Firefox and use the "DownThemAll" download manager extension, which for me is far superior to Opera's built in one. Apart from that, I don't use FF at all, but I wouldn't get rid of it.

Well I run into space problems in my flash disk/MP3 player with 2GB capacity. I stack it up with 200mb+ installers so choosing what is better in performance is the goal I'm currently looking for.