Opera 10 Released
September 1st, 2009 (6:55am) Simon Mackie 7 CommentsTweet This (11)
Opera 10, the latest version of the innovative browser, launched today. It sports a sleek new design and improved performance, thanks to improved handling of JavaScript and a new “Turbo” mode that uses compression technology to speed up slow connections.
As I reported back in June when the public beta became available, Opera 10 has impressive standards compliance, scoring a perfect 100 on the Acid3 test, and includes support for web fonts. It also has greatly improved JavaScript performance, although it’s still not as speedy as the latest versions Firefox or Google Chrome. The final release doesn’t seem to have changed greatly from the beta; running it through the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark gives a virtually identical score on my test machine.
In addition to the spiffy new interface (which I think is a huge improvement over previous versions of Opera) this latest release has universal spellcheck, a built-in email client, “Speed Dial” access to frequently visited pages and better tab handling (including the handy ability to see thumbnails of all of your open tabs).
Opera 10 is free, comes in 42 languages and is available for a wide variety of operating systems, including Windows, Mac and Linux. It is well worth checking out.
Note: Opera’s servers seem to be struggling under the load as everyone downloads the new browser, so you might have to be patient. Alternatively, you can also access Opera’s FTP server directly (you’ll just need to find the right directory for your OS and language)
Let us know your thoughts about Opera 10 in the comments.
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I hope they include private browsing on the next version (e.g. Google Chrome’s incognito mode)
Opera 10 is so underrated, I’ve recently become a fan (after years and years of IE abuse which led to ff and chrome)
Opera really has it all (I love it better everyday)
Opera has had an email client built in for so long, I can’t remember when (if ever) it didn’t. At least since the last century.
I’ve been using FF on my Mac even though it’s a bit slow, as no other browser catered for my needs. Having downloaded Opera 10, it’s the first version I’d use on Mac and so far I haven’t gone back to FF. The new tab bar is genius. Although OmniWeb first used tab thumbnails, Opera’s tab bar is much more useful and can be tailored to individual preferences.
Still crying out for a decent, auto-updating AdBlock. That’s the ONLY reason I use FF