New Opera browser release focuses on speed

Opera has released a new version of its browser with instant page loading and Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) on board. Over the last year, Opera has brought a large set of unique features to the browser. With today’s release, Opera focuses purely on making the browser super-fast.

Speed is super important for users

Web content is getting heavier and heavier but, at the same time, people expect that web pages will load faster and faster.

“Web browsers need to evolve faster in order to keep up with people’s expectations,” says Krystian Kolondra, Head of Opera for computers. “Last year, we sped up the Opera browser with features like native ad-blocking, page-load speed optimization, and faster start-up. Now, with instant page loading, we are giving it another boost that will squeeze loading time almost to zero.”

What is instant page loading?

Instant page loading is a mechanism where the Opera browser predicts which website you are typing the address for and begins loading it in the background before you hit enter.

Instant page loading becomes smarter over time by learning which URL inputs led to a specific website. For example, if you type “nyt.com” on multiple occasions, it will learn from this and begin loading the New York Times in the background. In addition, when you search for something in the address bar, it will load the results likely to be clicked in the background.

But wait, there’s even more speed

This new version brings 13% faster startup time compared to Opera 42. Furthermore, the browser engine has gotten a performance boost confirmed by several benchmarks, such as Speedometer (60.3% faster compared to Opera 42), JetStream (7.7%), and Octane (3.35%).

These achievements are possible thanks to Profile Guided Optimization (PGO). PGO is a Visual Studio compiler feature able to make software running on Windows significantly faster. With the help of PGO, Opera can run compiled data faster by selecting a number of important scenarios. It also teaches the compiler which code is important and which is not.