Opera 10 Beta is out, and it's great! Ted Miller was nice enough to give me an early look, and this is what to expect:

Visual Tabs


Do I have to say more?

Not an Opera first, but still great and it is good to see that Opera isn't afraid of using good features they didn't invent.



Better Speed Dial

You finally can configure the size and background of the Speed Dial! Great!

Stuff that was already in the Alpha Snapshots:

Opera Turbo

If you have an UMTS Stick but no Data flat then you'll love this! Once switched on it takes all traffic to Opera's servers and compresses them for you, so you don't have to waste bandwidth. (Beware that compressed pictures look of course a little worse.)

SPEED

The most important aspect of a browser for me is really big here

Other new features

  • Opera Turbo
  • Automatic updates
  • Crash logging
  • Inline spelling checker
  • 100/100 and pixel-perfect on the Acid3 test
  • Significantly improved performance, particularly on CSS/HTML rendering
  • Opera Mail HTML Compose support

The good the bad but no ugly


Pros: Opera keeps being the best browser in the world (for me). The new skin is really nice. Plus everything I already wrote above.

Cons: When upgrading from an Alpha it crashed on me and I had to do a clean install. (Should have done anyway...) The skin isn't complete, therefore the visual tabs don't work when placed on the left like I do. (Great for wide screens.) Visual Tabs need far too much space at the top. Normal people that have a normal Notebook have a resolution of 1280x800 - there is nut much left for the website...


All in all Opera is still the best browser on earth, but this doesn't mean it couldn't be improved...


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