On Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010 Opera Software announced the arrival of their web browser Opera 10.50 Beta. In the press release regarding the release of the beta the company touts the browser to be the fastest browser.

However, despite Opera’s claims, it seems they have a little more work to do to live up to the claim that their browser is the fastest. Stephen Shankland, Senior writer at CNET did some testing of his own and the results are in.

For his test, Shankland stated the following in regards to the browsers used for testing:

“The Opera version is the only one to sport a beta label. I called the Firefox software version 3.7a because Mozilla did, but this preview version may not actually be called 3.7 when it’s released. The Chrome version is 5.0.317.2, part of the developer-preview channel and still a relatively early branch of the new 5.0 tree. Finally, for WebKit–the foundation of Apple’s Safari–I downloaded the latest nightly build, called r54649.”

While Stephen Shankland ran his tests on a single machine – a dual-core Lenovo T61 with 3GB of memory running Windows XP SP3, different machines will produce different results.

Stephen Shankland’s article is interesting, it really sheds some light on how the browsers compare. Of course, you can run  your own tests, “On my machine, though, Carakan lagged Chrome in JavaScript performance on both the SunSpider 0.9 test from the WebKit team and the V8 test from Google, named after Chrome’s JavaScript engine.” Shankland noted of the tests performed.

If you are interested to see how your browser stacks up, we encourage to run the aforementioned tests on your system.