Not long after the release of Opera 10.50, Opera have released Opera 10.51 for Windows.

The release not only addresses several security and bug fixes, it is also up to 20% faster in JavaScript benchmarks than 10.50 was.

Opera 10.51 is now the fastest browser when it comes to running the Pacekeeper benchmarking tool.

A full list of changes for this release can be found in the changelog.

The update can be downloaded from the Opera website, while existing Opera 10.50 users will be automatically upgraded thanks to the browsers new auto-update technology.

I have gone and put Opera 9.64, Opera 10 Alpha, and Opera 10 Beta 1 through the Acid 3 test, V8 Benchmark, and SunSpider Benchmark tools to see how the new browser is stacking up.

The results are pleasing, with the browser clearly heading in the correct direction. Graphed results are below.

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With the release of Google Chrome, John Resig has performed JavaScript benchmark tests on a wide variety of browsers on both Windows Vista and XP. These browsers include:

• Chrome 0.2
• Safari 4
• Safari 3.1.2
• Opera 9.5.2
• Firefox 3.1
• Firefox 3.0.1
• IE7
• IE8 Beta 2

Testing, using three benchmarking tools; SunSpider, V8 Benchmark, and Dromaeo, has produced some interesting results. Results show that Google Chrome is ahead in all but one benchmark test – very impressive for a browser that is still in its early beta stages. It shows the performance of the new V8 JavaScript engine and the power of the WebKit rendering engine found in both Chrome and Safari.

You can read the full JavaScript Performance Rundown article to see the other (not-so)surprissing results.