Opera Software has released the first beta of Opera 10, the newest
version of the company’s web browser. Opera 10 beta sports new
features, a fresh look and feel, and enhanced speed and performance.
It’s completely free for Mac, Windows and Linux users and can be
downloaded here: http://www.opera.com/browser/next/
One new feature is Opera Turbo. Using state-of-the-art compression
technology, Opera Turbo unclogs your connection so you can get to
your content, according to Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner. Opera Turbo
easily delivers 3x to 4x the speed of slower connections and can
offer broadband-like speeds on dial-up, he adds.
Designer Jon Hicks has spiced up the user interface. “Initially, we
were just going to clean-up some elements and focus on the interface
for new features,” he says. “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. In the new version, 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 comes standard with an e-mail client, newsfeed readers and
BitTorrent support within the browser. In Opera 10, you can now
choose to use a variety of web-mail providers, online feed readers or
other BitTorrent clients as your default choice.
Web developers can also take advantage of the new features in Opera
Dragonfly, the 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.
Opera 10 beta also improves upon existing features in the Opera 10
alpha. The inline spell-checker now supports 51 languages, using the
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.