I thought it'd be good idea to share what I meant by saying Opera is the best browser. There are lots of factors which determine the superiority of a browser (and any piece of software for that matter).

There are few benchmarks out already for Opera 9.5 and one of them pointed to the JavaScript speed tests. Try it for yourself. The script which is executing is right there so you can see what exactly is going on.

I ran these tests on Opera, Safari for Windows, Firefox and IE 10 times and put it on a graph.

Now you see what I meant, don't you? Its obvious from the results that Opera kicks IE and Firefox's butt big time. :) Surprisingly, Safari is pretty close. This is just one test out of HTML rendering, startup , network speeds et all.

Click here to open the detailed browser speed comparisons (Opera 9.5 not included).

Adding to all these goodies, Opera is always fun to use. There are lots of features which you'll just love. Like the mouse gestures. And starting to download the file while you are still thinking where to save it. And shortcut to paste and go to the URL instead of pasting it and hitting return. And allowing the User Mode view. And really useful zoom. And Feed Reader. And mail client. And Speed Dial. And Widgets. And "Speak" which reads the selected text as humanly as possible. I can keep going for quite sometime but you get the idea. :)

Happy Browsing!