Opera 10 Beta : Fresh Look & Feel With Enhanced Speed & Performance

Opera today released the first beta of Opera 10, the newest version of the company’s industry-defining Web browser. Opera 10 beta sports a surprising array of new features, a fresh look and feel, and enhanced speed and performance.

Opera Turbo cures the bandwidth blues

If you have ever waited on dial-up, slammed hard into a bandwidth cap imposed by your ISP, or gotten stuck on a crowded Wi-Fi hot spot, Opera Turbo is here to rescue you. Using state-of-the-art compression technology, Opera Turbo unclogs your connection so you can get to your content. Opera Turbo easily delivers 3x to 4x the speed of slower connections and can offer broadband-like speeds on dial-up.

An interface-lift

A world-renowned designer Jon Hicks (see: twitter.com/hicksdesign) joined Opera to spice up user interface design. “Initially, we were just going to clean-up some elements and focus on the interface for new features,” said Jon 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 and will continue to evolve before the final release of Opera 10.

Tabbed browsing update from the original pioneers

The tab bar is now resizeable, but with a twist. Pull down the tab bar (or double-click the handle) to reveal full thumbnails of all your open tabs.

Opera Speed Dial just became your Speed Dial

Speed Dial has been a favorite of Opera fans since its introduction, and now you can personalize it. 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. New Speed Dial is now as flexible for you as it is fast.

The application integration trifecta

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.

Performance and Web standards: Opera’s cornerstones

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. Web developers can enjoy Web Fonts support, RGBA/HSLA color and new SVG improvements.

Web developers can also take advantage of the new features in Opera Dragonfly, set of on-board Web development tools. Opera Dragonfly alpha 3 now allows you to edit the DOM and inspect HTTP headers and comes in more than 36 languages.

But wait, there’s more...

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 also 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 also 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.

It is completely free for Windows, Mac and Linux users from

http://www.opera.com/next/