Opera 12 Alpha + Hardware Acceleration = Fast!

Last week saw the release of Opera 12 Alpha with full hardware acceleration for WebGL graphics.

Opera 12 Alpha can be downloaded from their site over here.

The main benefits being touted include:

• Faster graphics with hardware acceleration
• New HTML5 engine
• Faster browsing with reduced memory usage
• New themes
• New address field
• WebGL support for games 3D content

All in all it's looking good for this release.  To get the most out of Opera 12 Alpha although you will need to have a modern graphics card with up to date drivers.  DirectX support isn't in there yet  but the notes claim this will be available later at some point.

It's a good release for an alpha and it feels smooth and speedy.  I still find that some pages look a little odd sometimes in Opera, and it's something that has happened over the past five or six releases and I have never worked out why.   That might just be me, but I don't think it is.  It's also a bit of a memory snatcher as well, but this is quite typical of an early release.  It's worth a try anyway.

YSlow now Available for Opera, Chrome in Beta

For those of you who have read some of my previous posts, you will know that I'm a big fan of the YSlow extension that until now has only been available for Firefox.

For those of you who don't know what YSlow is, it's basically a small tool that analyses every part of page performance.  Each aspect of your site is graded and improvements are suggested.  If you get a chance, have a read through my post on 'How to Speed up Your Website' where I use YSlow in combination with a number of other tools that really work.

Chrome users can have their cake as well, albeit a slightly smaller piece until it leaves the beta stage.  Version 3.0.6 is available from the Chrome Web Store right now.

YSlow really is one of the best tools out there for squeezing every drop of performance out of your pages.  Be aware for those people who want to use this who are using Firefox, you will need to have the Firebug extension installed.

If you want to get started, here is what you need to do.

1. Using Opera for desktop, install the extension from the Opera extensions sites.
2. Visit the website you'd like to measure the performance of.
3. Click the YSlow icon in your toolbar, then click the "Run Test" button.

For more details about YSlow, take a look at the main YSlow site.