I've been waiting to try it out since I heard the first rumblings about Carakan, and it's here at long last. Opera's new Javascript engine has finally appeared in the developer build just posted on their website. 

The bottom line: it's fast. Carakan should serve as proof to the world that Opera is serious about building a competitive browser.

Yes, Google, you can proudly herald this one as a major victory for your browser in my books. If other Javascript benchmarks haven't been anything you could get excited about, maybe this one will do it. Ben Firshman's Javascript NES emulator runs best in Google Chrome.

Opera 10 final is out, Chrome just turned one year old, and Firefox 3.5 has settled into stability. It's time once again to break out the timers and speed test today's web browsers.

Like all our previous speed tests, this one is unscientific, but thorough. We install the most current versions of each browser being tested—in this case, Opera 10, Chrome's development channel 4.0 version, and the final Firefox 3.5 with security fixes—in a system with a 2.0 GHz Intel Centrino Duo processor and 2GB of RAM, running Windows XP.

We use Rob Keir's tiny timer app to time each browser in the common ways that leave users waiting: a "cold start" right after boot, a "warm start" after already having run once, and waiting on eight tabs to load up. We run each test three times and average the results, tossing out any obvious irregularities.