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On Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:24:57 -0000, Auric__ <not.my.real@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Opera runs... slow on this machine. (Slow enough that I'm considering
removing 9.20 and throwing on something older, like 7.something.)
Well it depends what sites you browse, but I'm starting to find a few are
having problems in Opera 8.54 now. The navigation on some retailer
websites doesn't work properly and YouTube is painfully slow because of
the Javascript and the video slider doesn't work properly either. Opera
9.64 is absolutely fine. Opera 7 will be even worse because it lacks some
features used by many sites these days (such as the Javascript and styling
functions that make all those Web 2.0 pages work) and is less perfect when
it comes to drawing web pages, so pages are more likely to break. It also
doesn't have user Javascript, which allows Opera Software to patch broken
scripts on popular websites, so that's even more of a reason it will break
on some sites.
Having said that, is there any compelling reason to upgrade to 9.64 on
this
machine? Or to not go back a major version or two?
When Opera 9.5 and 9.6 launched, I remember there being claims it was
faster than 9.27 but I don't know if that's really true or just some
carefully selected benchmarks. What's probably worth trying is installing
Opera 9.64 in a separate folder so that it can run in tandem with 9.2.
That way you can try it out for a while before deciding whether to sick
with it or not. If you just install 9.64 over 9.20, it'll change the
formats and structure of some of Opera's system files and there's no easy
way of going back. So try 9.64 on its own and if you like it, then you can
remove the 'test' installation and install it again over 9.2.
The same goes with older versions, you could try installing them into
their own folders and see how they fare on the websites you use. I don't
think you'll be able to install Opera 7.54U2 or 8.54 over 9.27 though,
because the system files use different formats and get converted the first
time you run the later version.
But in any case, you should upgrade to 9.27 because it's no slower or
faster than 9.20, but does contain a lot of important security and bug
fixes.
Oh, and if you use Opera's mail client, this was pretty fast up until
Opera 9.0; then it became horribly slow to delete mail. But it was all
changed again in 9.5 and now it's quick again.
As for compelling reasons to upgrade, Opera 9.5 introduced a new history
search that can give you a search engine-like interface to search through
the whole text of the webpages you've been visiting, not just the title
and URL. However this feature is more hard drive intensive so it may be
slow on an old machine. It also saw big technical updates to the browser
to help it render more broken web pages than ever before. There's also a
new default skin, though the old one is still available from the skins
settings or from the My Opera website.
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