Opera 43 Lands With "Instant Page Loading"

Opera Software today announced that the Opera 43 web-browser is shipping, assuming you are still running this closed-source web-browser on Linux.

The two main features for Opera 43 is a new feature called "Instant Page Loading" and enabling PGO, but the PGO build is only used by Opera on Windows.

Instant Page Loading is Opera's latest effort to speed up page load times after all their optimization work in earlier releases. Instant Page Loading is basically predictive loading depending upon the URL you are typing, similar to Google's predictive search behavior. Krystian Kolondra of Opera explained, "Instant page loading is a technology that predicts which website you’re typing the address for. Once recognised, it begins loading the site in the background even before you hit enter...Instant page loading becomes smarter over time by learning which URL inputs led to a specific website. 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. In addition, when you search for something in the address bar, it will load the results likely to be clicked in the background."

Opera 43 is also built with Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) enabled, but that's only for the Windows build. Even though GCC and Clang have mature PGO support on Linux, unfortunately, they aren't doing a PGO build there. Enabling PGO on Windows they found their browser to startup about 13% faster and to offer significant performance gains in a number of JavaScript benchmarks.

More details on Opera 43's release over at Opera.com.