It runs Maemo/Meego, which is based on Debian, and can therefore run lots of standard Linux programs. It's also fully open and not locked down at all, unlike iOS/Android. The things that it can do that other phones can't do are very niche hacker things though, hence the popularity on Slashdot. I do have one, and it's fun to play around with, and certainly better than anything else for using a terminal and SSHing into servers, but for anything else I much prefer Android, since it's much easier to use and has apps that are better designed for touchscreens.

You're thinking of VP8, the codec. V8 is the name of Chrome's JavaScript engine, which is generally considered to be the fastest JS engine of any browser.

Sounds like you're talking about XFCE. It's quite similar to Gnome 2, simple and usable, but is indeed lacking some features and polish.

You might want to look into Cinnamon too. It's a fork of Gnome 3 developed by Mint, but is available on various other distros now. It uses the underlying code of Gnome 3 but has an interface similar to Gnome 2. I haven't tried it myself, but it has been getting good reviews.

Those links are all over 2 years old, so don't really prove anything about the performance of Opera now. Especially considering how much webkit has developed in that time, and the shift in focus towards JS performance. The second link even says to stop posting it on Slashdot because it's so outdated.

Actually, it does seem to update itself on Ubuntu, outside of the package manager. Mine updated overnight on my work computer, but I have no root/sudo access to install programs normally. Not entirely sure how it does that.

Or they could just use one of the many commercial products available that do this sort of filtering for you. But no, of course we need the government to do it for everyone.

Mercury, and essentially every browser on iOS, is just a different UI on top of Safari. Obviously this allows for extra features, but limits how much can be done with them. Apple enforces this rule, and doesn't allow browsers which use a different rendering engine. Android doesn't have this limitation, which allows for a much larger variety of browsers, and much bigger gaps in performance. The same site did a similar test with iOS browsers, and the performance results were very similar, which isn't exactly surprising since they all use the same back end.

While some of the results are interesting, I don't think this is a particularly good comparison. For a lot of the tests they said "This doesn't work on this browser, so we didn't include that test". Surely that should be a win for the browsers that DO support it, rather than just ignoring that feature. Personally, I'd care more that a browser can render more things, rather than if it can render some things a few seconds faster, but fail at others.

Not to mention, it completely ignores things like features, reliability, usability, security, etc, which are very varied between the different browsers. That's what I base my choice on anyway, and many that I've tried either crash, fail to load some pages, render pages incorrectly, or lack important features. Personally I find Firefox works best for me, but results would probably vary with different phones/OS versions, and some features are more important than others for different people

But hey, everyone loves benchmark numbers

The Intel Atom CPUs actually have pretty low power usage compared to ARM. The Intel powered RAZR i has better battery life than the ARM powered RAZR M (identical hardware besides the SoC). The performance of the Intels isn't quite as good in mobiles, but that's partly down to optimisation.

Android has been ported to x86, a lot of the code was contributed by Intel themselves. There's only one or two x86 based Android phones out so far though, so you're right that it is primarily an ARM market.