According to statistics from research institutes, the browser market is still dominated by Chrome, and Opera’s market share is only 2.24%. Although the number of users is no longer what it used to be, Opera is still constantly optimizing, improving, and enhancing user experience.

For example, last month, Opera launched the innovative Lucid mode, which is a feature that can improve the picture quality of streaming video (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.), which can improve the picture quality of old videos with one click, making the content look clearer. This feature is driven by hardware acceleration and relies primarily on the computer’s GPU to process the content of the screen.

Opera has been updated again recently, but this time the update does not focus on new features, but on underlying improvements that make the browser significantly faster.

Opera says its browser is now 16 percent faster at rendering web pages and processing requests, and 14 percent faster at processing graphics than it was six months ago.

This speed increase is mainly due to improvements in the following three areas, namely build optimization, link time optimization, and engine settings adjustments.

build optimization

Opera is using Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) across platforms, a feature that optimizes code based on profiles created by testing samples running various live user scenarios. The test results show which parts of the program are executed more frequently, so that these parts can be optimized more effectively.

Link Time Optimization

For this optimization, Opera also enabled maximum link time optimization. Link Time Optimization (LTO) is a form of interprocedural optimization (IPO) whose purpose is to improve the performance of programs that contain many small but frequently used functions. The way LTO is implemented allows these optimizations to cover all the different parts of the program as a single module, leading to better performance.

Adjustments to engine settings

Opera has also improved out-of-process 2D canvas rasterization in out-of-process rendering, offloading all rendering tasks to the GPU (graphics processing unit). This helps to reduce the load on the CPU, so that your system runs more smoothly, and reduces the power consumption of portable devices such as notebooks and improves battery life.

A 16% increase in rendering web pages and processing requests, and a 14% increase in graphics processing was achieved through the Speedeter and Motionmark benchmarks. The latest version with these improvements is now generally available, and you can benefit from upgrading to the latest version.