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Opera 10.5 pre-alpha is on Carakan, by far the fastest Javascript rendering available

Look, we know there is a “Ain’t nuthin wrong with Safari” crowd out there who isn’t interested in other browsers like Firefox, Chrome and now Opera.  That’s OK, just head over to the next story.

For those who are interested, Opera has an Alpha release of their new Javascript Engine, Caraken, that is damn fast on slower connections (like the Mifi here at the parents’ vacation house).  Lifehacker ran some tests and it clobbered everying out there on Javascript tests, sometimes doubling or

tripling the performance of Chrome. 

I’m using Gmail which seems faster on Opera than either Chrome or Safari but can’t vouch for any of these tests personally.

Download it for Mac here.  Again, please remember that this is an unstable development build. There are known bugs, unimplemented UI elements and surprise crashes.

It also has some nice pre-caching features for slow connections that are help the holiday work go by a bit easier…

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