Opera 10 has been released. This release of Opera sports a number of alluring, new features, many of them not seen in any of its contenders. The enhancements to look out for in Opera 10 are as follows.
Opera Turbo
Opera Turbo when enabled will boost your browsing speed by a significant factor. This increase in speed is more pronounced when you are browsing on a slow Internet connection like a dial-up. Opera achieves this by acting as a web proxy to your client. The servers at Opera will retrieve your web page, compress it and then send it to your browser thus reducing the size of data and consequently boosting speed. Among other means, the compression is achieved by image down-sampling therefore some level of distortion in graphics may occur.
Opera 10 is much faster
Opera 10 is upto 40% faster than its predecessor. Check out the web specifications supported in Opera presto 2.2 - the web engine powering Opera. Though this benchmark puts it a little (6 percent) behind Google Chrome 2.0.172.Improved speed dial settings
Now you can configure speed dial to show upto 25 of your frequently visited websites. And you can provide a custom background too.
Visual Tabs
Innovative visual tabs display web pages in thumbnails. To see the visual tabs in Opera 10, just stretch the tab border south and the tabs will be magically transformed into ones with visual appeal.
Web mail integration
Opera now allows you to choose your preferred web mail such as Gmail, Yahoo or any of the scores of web mail services as your default mail client in Opera. This means that when you click on a email link, Opera opens your preferred web mail instead of the default email software on your machine. This is true for all your RSS feeds as well. If you use Google reader to subscribe to websites, then you can configure Opera to import all your RSS feeds into Google reader by default.Rich text support for Opera mail client
Opera 10 has support for rich text editing in mail client. You can use bullets, change the font properties of characters as well as insert images inline.These are the major, albeit a subset of new features in Opera 10.
Opera is available for multiple platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris; As well as some lesser known operating systems such as QNX, OS/2 and BeOS. And it comes in more than 43 different languages. Opera has always strived for full standards compliance. Not surprisingly, Opera 10 boasts of a 100/100 score in the Acid 3 test.
It is remarkable really that Opera, a company which has just one product - namely a web browser - has been so successful in making money. It's annual revenue stands at a significant $79.5 million dollars. [Source : Business Week].
Opera User Interface
The following image provides an overview of Opera web browser's user interface.
Credits: Opera.com
How to install Opera 10 in Ubuntu
If you are using Debian or one of its derivatives like Ubuntu, then there is a repository for Opera from which you can download Opera 10 using apt-get or dpkg. Visit deb.opera.com for details. Of course, you can also download Opera 10 for your Linux distribution directly from its website.Opera 10 for Linux is built using Qt3. But a Qt4 port is also available for download at the following location.
Opera 10 Reviewer's guide
Finally, here is a very well made video showcasing all the important features built in Opera 10.Read an earlier review of Opera 9.0
