Opera 9.6

[Funkstar]

Opera 9.6 is out.

Been using a late beta for the past couple of days here at work and installed the final release at home last night. Even faster than 9.52 (my benchmark is the SqueezeCenter 7.x default interface, it's pretty demanding for CSS and JavaScript).

http://www.opera.com/

[MarcLister]

Yep got this the other day. Looks good. No reliability issues on my PC. Just some problems where Opera 9.5x/9.6 seem to be rather RAM hungry.

Might need that quad-core Vista HP x64 PC sooner than I thought.

[Funkstar]

8GB, thats what you want. Not had a memory problem yet

[MarcLister]

Lol yes! Got 2Gb on XP here. Am speccing 8Gb for my Vista install. Was originally going for 4Gb but with Superfetch, Vista x64 and cheap RAM prices 8Gb makes sense.

[this_is_gav]

8GB... so a web browser fits with the rest of a Windows OS? How the hell can 2GB not be enough when running a browser?

[MarcLister]

8GB... so a web browser fits with the rest of a Windows OS? How the hell can 2GB not be enough when running a browser?

Yup.

Don't know how 2Gb isn't enough for me. All I can say is that recent versions of Opera have gotten very RAM hungry for me.

[BUFF]

Opera 9.52 uses about 250k for me with 16 tabs open currrently on XP with 2GB.
If you've got RAM available it will use it & if you don't it will still run fine.

[peterb]

75 tabs open, starting it used roughly an extra 400MB of RAM on a Fedora system.

It is using 60% of RAM and 24% of swap. Memory is there - it might as well use it!

[MarcLister]

Yes I agree. However I bet your PCs don't seem to run sluggish and take ages to switch between windows and apps when Opera is running. Shut it down and all seems normal. I can't understand why this is but it does happen.

[Golden Dragoon]

250mb usage for me, never seems to go much above that and I have 20+ tabs open inc a few gametrailers\youtube vids

[Giraffe]

Opera will use RAM if it's available.

I once had to drop to 512MB RAM and Opera used far less than with 1GB RAM, so it does seem to manage RAM very well.

[Funkstar]

well I've just opened it with two tabs open and it's using about 160mb. Outlook had been open for days and it using 133mb.

the the king is sidebar.exe which has two instances, one at 19mb, the other at a whopping 246mb!

Thats getting killed. Although I am only using 35% of physical memory right now

EDIT: Re-launched sidebar and it's down to 25mb and 16mb. looks like there is a memory leak in there somewhere.

[peterb]

I'm pretty sure the earlier versions of Opera (on Linux) were leaky. This has been open all evening with no creepage - not a scientific test though! 9.52 was suggish shutting down - with a not responding error message before it finally did terminate. That could have been because I had so many tabs open though.

Edit - just shut it down - same error message before it shuts down cleanly - and closing (75 or so tabs) released 500MB af RAM.

[Funkstar]

wow, I've never had that many tabs open at a time!

I do have a couple of issues with Opera.
1) things don't look quite right when using the RBoS online banking system. I blame RBoS for that though
2) there is a bug when using the default interface on SqueezeCenter. I've been speaking to the main interface developer about it, and it is definitely an Opera bug, he's been waiting for it to be fixed in every version since 9.5.

On another note, I installed this AJAX spell checker earlier and it is really good!
http://operawatch.com/news/2007/03/a...-in-opera.html

I just need to remember and actually check my spelling for posts
(rumour has it that Opera 10 will have in-line, built in spell checking)

[Giraffe]

Never had a problem with Opera using excessive memory. Had it running for >12h and the useage hasn't gone too far - I can get a good idea by just closing it and watching the RAM free in T-Clock in the tray.
I'm sticking with 9.53 for now; when 9.61(+) is out I'll have a look. I am using 9.6 for odd things and tinkering with the setting up and it does seem faster than 9.53.

[this_is_gav]

If you've got RAM available it will use it & if you don't it will still run fine.

I agree with that completely, and I've been arguing that in the defence of Vista forever it seems, but how much RAM can a web-browser use? There are only so many plugins, and surely cached pages don't take that much. What is it prefetching?

It's not like you can load data in advance too much, as 90% of the time it takes longer to check a page for updates than it does for that cached data to be loaded from the hard drive.

I thought Firefox had the rep for using up RAM.