Quote:
Originally Posted by vangogh
Interesting Forrest. I've suspected for awhile that Opera might be the best of breed when it comes to browsers, but I can't say to have used it much.
|
In terms of memory usage that's true. I can have 300 tabs open without hurting performance, and still use less ram than Firefox with two or three. The user interface is beautiful, and I've got curious and tried to make it seize up, but no luck provoking it to, either. I haven't seen it crash, but I haven't tried, and I'm sure that's possible.
I think it just uses a different model for dividing work. In Windows, only the thread that created a window or a control can do just about anything with it. The window is running a message loop - literally a do/while - taking a message from the O/S, stuff like repaint the screen, or the mouse changed to a hover state, and responding to those messages. You're not supposed to do anything that takes more than a few milliseconds on the window's main thread. Most people take that to mean anything you expect to take longer than that, but if some disc IO unexpectedly takes half a minute, the app will be unresponsive for that half minute, before coming back to life. I've seen FF go unresponsive longer than that, but I'm guessing it was running a jscript on the main thread, and the script hung.
Sometimes Opera has trouble with text areas, though. |
