Opera 43 Released With Instant Page Loading, Profile Guided Optimization, and More

Opera has released its latest desktop browser - version 43, which it claims is its fastest browser yet, for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Interestingly, the company has introduced a new feature, called Instant Page Loading, which allows the browser to preload webpages in background even before the user actually searches for them from the address bar. Apart from the aforementioned features the company has also introduced Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) to its browser for Windows.

The Instant Page Loading feature in Opera 43 essentially predicts the web address that the user is typing and loads it in the background so that the page loads up instantly when the user presses the Enter key. The feature improves over time by learning which URL inputs led to a particular website, Krystian Kolondra, Opera Desktop head, said in a blog post.

"For example, if you type 'nyt.com' on multiple occasions, it will learn from this and begin loading the New York Times in the background," Kolondra said in his post.

Further, when a user searches for something in the address bar, the browser will load the results likely to be clicked in the background, it added. "Opera can predict what page a user is going to load not only from its behavior, but also when the current page uses the < link rel=prerender ... > tag," Kolondra said.

The other feature introduced with Opera 43, Profile Guided Optimization, is a compiler technique that allows the software running on Windows to work "significantly" faster, as per the company. Profile Guided Optimization is able to tell apart the important tasks from the regular ones to the compiler in order for the browser to complete the crucial tasks faster, while using less processing power.

"With this technology, startup is 13 percent faster. Also, the browser engine has gotten a performance boost, confirmed by several benchmarks such as Speedometer (60.3 percent improvement compared to Opera 42), JetStream (7.7 percent), and Octane (3.35 percent)," Kolondra said in his post.

The startup benchmark was performed on a computer running Windows 7 x32 using an i7-4600 CPU locked at 2.1GHz while the performance benchmarks were performed on a computer running Windows 10 x64 using an i7-6500U CPU. In both cases, builds 43.0.2442.686 (PGO) and 42.02393.78 were used for comparison.

Apart from these two features, Opera 43 has added classic link selection to the browser that allows you to select the text in a link without triggering it. The Opera 43 for Windows, Linux, and macOS is already available for download from the company's website.