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Opera 9.5 Now Passes the Acid3 test – 100%!

Yes, it’s true! The Opera Desktop Team recently released news on their official blog that the next technical preview of Opera 9.5 Kestrel will pass all the 100 tests on Acid3, along with passing the Acid2 test, perfectly.

This is exciting news for me, and has filled me with hope. I was disheartened by the poor performance of Opera 9.5 Beta on my PCLinuxOS installation. The first reason was that after upgrading to the 9.5 Beta, I couldn’t downgrade to the 9.26 stable version. The beta was horribly unstable, crashing every 5 minutes or so, with any page containing Flash or AJAX. Moreover lots of keyboard shortcuts have been changed, which are very confusing, and conflict even more with the KDE shortcuts. I had completely lost hope that Kestrel would be any good, or would be as speedy and stable as promised. Meanwhile, I got to test the Firefox 3 Beta 4, which impressed me a lot with its speed and responsiveness. Then came in the Acid3 test, where Firefox 3 Beta 4 passed 7 more tests as compared to Opera 9.5 Beta. This made me determined to drop Opera as my mainstream browser and shift to Firefox 3 as soon as a stable version was released.

But thankfully, the Opera devs haven’t let me down completely, and have won another chance of trust by surprising me with this little thing. Here’s a screenshot -

This screenshot shows that WinGogi, the Windows version of reference builds used for the internal testing of Opera’s platform independent Core, passes all the 100 tests on Acid3.

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