I have taken Opera 9.5 for a test drive on both my local platforms, Windows Vista SP1 and Ubuntu 8.04. Browser loading speed appears to be faster on both platforms than FF3, and as well the rendering performance appears to be faster in general. However, there seems to be some rendering issues with Opera or at least some artifacts.

On NewEgg Opera has issues with rendering picture changes on the product pages as the mouse hovers over the various images. It at least feels jerky the first time it hovers over a different image. Probably a precaching difference in FF3, as it looks really smooth on FF3. This same performance issues appear on the larger image screens as well.

On Yahoo! Mail Opera appears to have the same kinda jerkiness with the new Ajaxy version of the mail platform. As I was marking messages in the window as spam, the tab bars above the grid would disappear and reappear. I would say the FF3 and IE7 don’t suffer from the same condition.

Now, I’m sure I can find some sites that FF3 falls on its face and Opera excels, but I can obviously see that Opera 9.5 is solid performer. I do like the interface a bit better, but the extensibility and familiarity of FF3 is hard for me to turn away at. At least this time I can say that I won’t uninstall Opera yet. Last version I dropped it like a hot potatoe. :-)

—Edit Oops, forgot to mention that Opera didn’t seem to like using a proxy.pac on my work VPN. However it did fine when you provided a static proxy server.