Opera 10 beta hits the streets
2009-06-03 12:23
Oslo - Opera on Wednesday released the first beta of Opera 10, the newest version of the company's web browser.
It sports a surprising array of new features, a fresh look and feel, and enhanced speed and performance.
"Your web browser is the most important piece of software you will ever use," says Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software.
"And we think Opera 10 will redefine how you can enjoy the web.
"When you try the features, enjoy the accelerated performance and get a glimpse at our shiny new wrapping, Opera 10 beta will excite both long-time users and those new to Opera," von Tetzchner says.
Interface-lift
The brand new look of Opera's new version was created by well-known designer Jon Hicks.
"Initially, we were just going to clean-up some elements and focus on the interface for new features," says Hicks.
"But, over time, the new user interface elements became so different that we decided to update everything. Mac users in particular should enjoy this update to the default Opera skin."
The new skin is a work in progress, he explains, and will continue to evolve before the final release of Opera 10.
Some more good news is that Opera Turbo promises to cure the bandwidth blues, by unclogging any slow connections with state-of-the-art compression technology.
It easily delivers 3x to 4x the speed of slower connections and can offer broadband-like speeds on dial-up.
Opera Speed Dial
Speed Dial has been a favourite of Opera fans since its introduction, and now it can also be personalised.
Have a large monitor? Super-size your Speed Dial with a 5x5 grid. Want to see your family or friends in every new tab? Add their smiling faces as a background image.
The result is a feature that has become as flexible as it is fast.
Opera comes standard with an e-mail client, newsfeed readers and BitTorrent support within the browser.
In Opera 10, you can now easily choose to use a variety of web-mail providers, online feed readers or other BitTorrent clients as your default choice.
Even without Opera Turbo, Opera 10 is now much faster on resource intensive pages such as Gmail and Facebook and is more than 40% faster than Opera 9.6.
Opera Dragonfly
As an added bonus web developers can enjoy Web Fonts support, RGBA/HSLA colour, new SVG improvements and also take advantage of new features in Opera Dragonfly, the web browser's set of on-board web development tools.
Opera 10 beta also improves upon existing features in the Opera 10 alpha.
The inline spell-checker now supports 51 languages, using the popular open source Hunspell dictionary format.
Opera 10 beta updates automatically, although you can choose to allow completely automatic updates or to be notified when an update is ready to install.
The e-mail client is improved with rich text editing including inline images, styled text, links, and full HTML.
You can also have Opera automatically delete e-mails from your POP server after a specified amount of time to keep your inbox nice and neat.
Opera 10 beta is free for Windows, Mac and Linux users and can be downloaded here.