Opera 10 ushered into spotlight

 

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Posted on 1 Sep 2009 at 10:22

Opera 10 has officially been released, only three months after the first beta was placed in the hands of testers.

Anybody who's been following the development of Opera 10 will find little in the final build to surprise them, though Opera claims all outstanding bugs have been squashed. However, new users will find quite a lot to keep them occupied.

The most striking addition are the visual tabs that appear of the top of the browser, offering live previews of the pages they represent. These can also be shrunken down to text, or text and favicons depending on preference. Users can also choose to sit the tabs bar on the top, bottom, left or right of the browser window.

The Presto rendering engine has come in for some serious attention, and Opera claims the latest version of the browser will deliver Javascript-heavy pages up to 40% faster than Opera 9.6.

The browser has also been optimised for low-bandwidth connections - a charge spearheaded by Turbo mode which uses proprietary technology to compress and serve pages.

Similarly, Opera Mail's low-bandwidth mode can be set so that it strips out images, attachments and anything else that isn't text from an email. It can also serve up a 100-word preview of an email message, allowing you to see whether it's worth downloading. There's also a threaded conversation view that will be immediately recognisable to users of Gmail.

Other tweaks are cosmetic, including the ability to add your own background image to the speed dial page, and a new skin.