Opera 10.5 beta breaks record with JavaScript benchmarks

Opera Software's beta of Opera 10.5 leapfrogged every rival to become the world's fastest browser, benchmark tests show. Released on Thursday and powered by a new JavaScript engine, Opera 10.5 beat all comers to easily take the top speed spot.

According to tests run by Computerworld, Opera 10.5 was nearly 15% faster than Safari for Windows and almost 20% faster than Google's Chrome, the previous No. 1 and No. 2 browsers. Opera's preview was more than twice as fast as Mozilla's Firefox 3.6, over eight times faster than Opera 10.10, and 10 times faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 (IE8).

Opera has been an also-ran in JavaScript speed tests for almost two years, ever since developers working on WebKit, the open-source browser engine that powers Apple's Safari, began bragging about massive JavaScript performance increases. Since then Mozilla built a new JavaScript engine for Firefox, and Google raised the speed ante with Chrome.