Opera 10 Hands on Beta

The browser world is on fire recently – only a short time after we saw a new 2.0 release for Google’s Chrome browser, Opera have launched the beta version of Opera 10, which has been sometime coming for fans of the program. If you’ve never used Opera before, it’s a browser that prides itself on a wide range of features that aren’t usually offered as standard in Firefox or Internet Explorer.

The new version has been released to compete with rendering engines Tracemonkey and V8, used by Firefox and Chrome respectively which give users the fastest possible access to web sites and multimedia content. This is no surprise, considering Opera started out life offering a far faster and more streamlined browsing experience than it’s contemporaries like Netscape Navigator. Operas rendering service Presto has been updated to 2.2, which the browser claims with offer a 30% speed boost over the old Presto.

Other new features include updates to Operas built in email client and an inline spell check, with the browser receiving a 100/100 score on the Acid3 web standards test which is great news for anyone interested in having their pages displayed properly and puts IE – whose recent browser fails the test completely – to shame.
There’s even an opera turbo feature that makes using the net faster for people on slower connections by utilizing various compression technology. It can be turned on or off via settings but also features an automatic mode which turns the feature on if it detects slow network speeds. This feature is great for portable systems that are likely to be using a range of different internet connections throughout the day.

Opera’s quick link system, Speed Dial, which logs your favourite sites and provides quick visual access to them on start-up has also been improved, with the browser adding various configuration options that let you move tiles around the specify the size of the grid to display a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 25 different pages. The browser has also been updated visually with several changes to the theme, more of which are due to be added as the browser progresses through beta.

Opera is a free download for all major platforms. Remember, this is a beta release and so not all features and pages may work correctly and you might notice bugs in the software. It’s still more than worth a try though, especially on slower connections.

[ Opera Homepage | Download Opera 9 | Download Opera 10 Beta ]