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Opera 10 Alpha 1 released
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 5th December 2008
The alpha build of Opera 10 might be a bit light on new features, but the Acid3 compliance and faster rendering engine is certainly welcome.
According to CNet, the latest release of the popular browser has plenty of tricks up its sleeve, and while some are simply tweaks to bring the feature set closer to that of other modern browsers there's plenty of neat stuff for the company to crow about.
Firstly, the rendering engine – Presto – has been updated to version 2.2, and promises a thirty percent speed increase over Presto 2.1 as used in Opera 9.5. While this latest engine is only seeing a home in the desktop build at the moment, the company has stated that it will form the basis of both the desktop and mobile versions of its products – which promises 100 percent rendering compatibility on both handsets and PCs. Nice.
Perhaps the biggest addition is improved support for the standards compliance Acid3 test: while Opera has always led the pack with adherence to official web standards – sometimes to the detriment of the user experience – this latest build represents the first time it has been able to score full marks on the Acid3 test. According to the latest figures from CNet this puts it in first place amongst browsers, with its closest neighbours being Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 and Google's Chrome 0.4 with 89 percent and 79 percent respectively.
A nice new feature – although hardly ground breaking – is the addition of a built-in spell checker for text boxes: something that rival browsers have had for several versions now, but still a welcome addition – especially if you have a tendency to make as many typos as I do.
If you fancy giving the alpha a go – but remembering that it is an alpha, and probably shouldn't be used on a production system – then you can download it right now from Opera's website. Currently, only Windows builds are available.
Any Opera fans pleased to hear that the next generation will boost their browsing performance, or does the company still have a long way to go before it reaches the heady heights of Internet Explorer or Firefox's popularity? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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though I need a clever way to manage and use bookmarks, I haven't found a satisfactory way to do it yet
=P
on vista i find its very fast due to superfetch as it preloads the sites that are stored in opera
opera stores the last pages on each tab and i must have like 20 tabs that i keep open (my preferred way) IE and firefox (when it works) just saves the links and re downloads them when you reopen the browser
You don't seem to be very sure what you're talking about. Opera has been faster in most scenarios than the other major browsers for years.
And better.
Gonna skip the alpha of this, features is what I care abouts, and they'll be shining more in beta, so I'll wait for that, or maybe even gold. Knowing the guys at Opera it'll be another solid improvement, not changing too much, just gently improving on an already fantastic browser.
Two ones that come to mind:
You can expand the speeddial options – mine is curretly 4 x 4 rather than 3 x 3
You can also give bookmarks and bookmark folders nicknames, such that when you hit F2, you can type in that nickname, and it'll open the webpage with that nickname, or all the webpages in the folder with that nickname.
*Note the "=P" at the bottom of the post*
I switched from FF3 to this (though I used to use Opera before FF3) and love all the little nifty things you can do. Creating searches with nicknames so as to just type "newegg core i7" and going straight to the search results, the mouse gestures are integrated very nicely, etc etc..
Can't wait for beta/full release!!
Couldn't say which is better, but Opera never quite did it for me (I did really like the preemptive "forward" selection though - I seem to recall a really nifty mouse gesture to flick to the next page in multipage documents).
I'm a bit symbiotic with my Fx install now, I know which add-ons I need and how to get everything I use regularly within two clicks. To get to know Opera that well would take some incentive.