Horrible Opera Scrolling Performance? No Fix In Sight

By | April 17, 2012 | 34 Comments

Horrible Opera Scrolling Performance? No Fix In SightIf you’ve been experiencing lag while scrolling various web pages (especially if surfing them with a zoom level higher than 100%), there we have some good and bad news for you.

The good news is that according to one of the reddit users, “Opera is bad at scrolling pages with elements that have the position:fixed property.”

The bad news? Turns out, “Devs have acknowledged it and they say that the fix is not easy and they don’t currently have any idea when or if it will be fixed.”

However, if such “answer” doesn’t exactly provide the help you wanted, you can always switch to any other web browser as all of them have better scrolling performance than Opera does, probably even IE6.

It’s a shame to see a once wonderful and smooth web browser turn into a sluggish and full of compatibility issues pile of code mash. Hopefully, that will be fixed soon.

Don’t lose your hopes yet though, the following comment could be very well false.


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism carrier back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

  • http://twitter.com/daneoshiga daneoshiga

    I my case disabling hardware acceleration on Opera fixed the issue

  • CGX106

    Do you have an exemplary page where Opera has scrolling issues? I use the browser for years and I never complained about the scrolling…

    • http://www.favbrowser.com FavBrowser.com
      • Geek

        disable Smooth Scrolling? no lagging for me..

        • http://hector-macias.blogspot.com Hector Macias Ayala

          Yeah, I think that worked out fine for me too, real showstopper is Opera fucking losing focus when youre typing.

      • zzzz

        No Problems with (( http://www.zdnet.com/ )) using the last opera next build, released yesterday

      • Armin

        They scroll fine in both Firefox and Opera.

    • http://twitter.com/Penge4 Penge
      • Armin

        Works fine in Firefox but not in Opera. I see!

    • Frustrated Opera User

      Try: http://www.status.mydevil.net/status.html
      Opera 11.62 Win7 64bit, smooth scrolling disabled. Latest Opera Next build has also low scrolling performance.

  • Sascha

    I only had this from version 9 or 10 up to 11.x on discussions.apple.com which had a very bad scrolling experience.

  • H576883

    So the source of this entire post is some random comment on Reddit? Cool.

    • http://twitter.com/Astrophizz Dillon Kuehner

      I probably should have sourced better in my post on reddit but I was just pointing out the issue and how it’s ongoing without a fix in sight. Opera devs have resorted to overriding the css to try to avoid issues. Luckily they do have it as a high priority bug: http://my.opera.com/sitepatching/blog/2012/01/09/c-net-gmail-ebay

      • http://www.favbrowser.com FavBrowser.com

         Hey, I did link to the reddit post, it’s under “reddit” in the article, sorry for unclear link structure in the post, will use [Via] next time :) 

        • http://twitter.com/Astrophizz Dillon Kuehner

          I meant that I should have included a source in the reddit post, since I posted that :)

  • Kai

    I generally getting a bit disappointed with Opera, it’s my favorite browser and don’t really want to change but you know Opera:
    - is adopting HTML5 and other new technologies as fast as other browsers.
    - can hardly print webpages
    - can’t display soft hyphens correctly

  • OP

    there really is a problem in scrolling performance with position:fixed property” in some sites that has it

    those sites that favbrowser post really is a problem(even when smooth scrolling is disabled)

    i wont lose any hope for opera devs to fix this issue 

    BUT

    if opera 12 final comes in and this huge issue isnt fixed then im considering switching browsers and kissed goodbye to opera

    this is a huge issue that needs to be fixed ASAp since newly created websites are coming with “position:fixed property” elements

  • Anonymous

    while slow, facebook and theverge are at least usable (and on the verge, the main problem is the home page, i don’t have big issues getting directly to the articles).

    i have a way worse offender to add: netvibes. don’t know if it is the same issue, but the scrolling there is HORRIBLE.

  • http://my.opera.com/rafaelluik Rafael

    And that requires a nitpicking article? :P

    The issue is already being looked into…

    • http://www.favbrowser.com FavBrowser.com

      I personally had this issue for a long time, don’t remember about v10 but definitely experienced this with 11.x :) 

      • http://my.opera.com/rafaelluik Rafael

        Thanks for confirming you’re doing nitpicking…? lol…

        They said many times they’re working hard to fix this issue, which “is not simple”. I don’t have this issue at all. Facebook is OK and for the other sites (except theverge) they canceled the propriety with Browser JS until the real issue is fixed.

  • Anonymous

    Opera devs can be tight-lipped/uncommunicative sometimes but if it had
    been fixed I would have imagined it would have slipped into a dev build
    released to the public.

    http://goo.gl/iQ2q7

  • Mm

    I have a worse issue with Opera Next: I can’t even lod my initial set of tabs.

  • Anon

    This slightly related, regarding bad performance when LOADING sites. After they load, site becomes responsive.

    But I also can’t play a damn YouTube video without a small freeze every 15 seconds: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=1365282

  • lol

    I have no problems with scrolling.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/David-Grane/100002393996156 David Grane

    when will be Opera  fixed  the scrolling?

  • Martin Suchan

    What about mentioning, that new Opera 12 build support WebCam access and got 400 points in HTML5test? :)

    • http://www.favbrowser.com FavBrowser.com

      Well, it all depends on news and priorities.

      it’s just one new feature, not really worth posting if I cna find something more interesting for that day.

      Will wait for the Beta announcement or few more interesting things to pop out :)

      However, if news dry up tomorrow and there is absolutely nothing new, I’ll go ahead and post it.

  • http://www.facebook.com/upendragon Uthea Ann Pendrachen

    just quit using opera tell them you taking it off and then they will fix it when they start losing customers i stopped way back at 9 it plain right sucks from there on tryed new one came out yesterday and it dont even play right with win 7 ultimate 64 bit so wont try another one waited this long still opera sucks

  • Anonymous

    They might not fix the scrolling problem soon, but they will probably refine HWA to make Opera run smoother. 

    • Tr

      so you are saying that opera team wont fixed this huge issue instead just refining the HWA to make opera smoother?

      too much “Standard Conformance” for opera eh? lol

      • Anonymous

        No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that instead of directly targeting the issue as we might want them to, they might take the back door approach to do the much same thing in a much more efficient manner. 

        Take site incompatibilities for example. Opera could have just patched those problems with browser.js. That may have been very thorough, but it would have bloated Opera terribly. Instead, they introduced an all-new HTML5 parser that fixed 30% of those problems. Rendering engine updates in the future may continue to fix more of these site incompatibility problems. 

        What I’m saying is that what seems like the most direct approach to us may not actually be the most efficient way to fix it. Since Opera’s HWA is still rough around the corners, refining the HWA feature may fix some of the scrolling problems. Then, if there is still an issue and many people are still complaining, they may directly address the issue. 

  • Guest

    Relax…they are not done yet.

    Cnet works fine, wait 1s.

    This one is not fine but works fine in 12.
    http://blogs.amd.com/play/

  • Mikah

    Ironic, Horrible Opera Scrolling Performance? No Fix In Sight
    & the same day Opera release a snapshot that solves my biggest scrolling issue thats been bugging me for months on
    http://digitalprotalk.blogspot.co.uk/  

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