Advanced

Opera 10 Beta - Preview & Screenshots

Posted by Chris7mas on · 16 comments
Tux Arena; By Craciun Dan 		Mail this story
Print this story

The last time I had a look at Opera 10 it was in alpha state, meaning no new features were introduced, and only the rendering engine was replaced with a newer one compared to 9.x series. This first Opera 10 beta comes with various new features.

The last time I had a look at Opera 10 it was in alpha state, meaning no new features were introduced, and only the rendering engine was replaced with a newer one compared to 9.x series. This first Opera 10 beta comes with various new features.

According to the announcement on the official website, the new rendering engine is 40% faster, the speed dial has been improved, the design was changed compared to 9.64, there is now a resizable search field, and a new browsing mode for slow connections, called Opera Turbo.

The first thing that jumped in my eyes was the new interface, Opera 10 beta using a blue theme, different from the black one used in 9.6x. Here's how it looks:



Opera allows now for tabs to be resized, and previews of the web pages loaded in them are shown in the tab space. Here's a screenshot to make this clearer:

Resizable tabs

Presto, the rendering engine used by Opera, has also been improved, and if we take into account what the official website says, it should be up to 40% faster compared to older versions. The Acid3 score for Opera 10 was maximum, 100/100, while Firefox 3.0 got 72/100 and Google Chrome unstable for Linux got 99/100.

Opera Acid3 Test - 100/100

The location bar (also called search field) can also be resized, leaving more space to the fast search box to the right.

Opera 10 has support for widgets too, just like older versions. Here's a crossword game, running inside Opera:

Crossroad widget running in Opera

As always, Opera provides packages for various Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE or Mandriva.

Opera 10 beta comes with all the additional features its users are already used with: integrated BitTorrent, IRC and email clients, support for widgets, a sidebar which provides access to stuff like bookmarks or even notes. On top of this, Opera is highly configurable, allowing you to configure each and every aspect of it, from keyboard shortcuts to the user agent. Just like Firefox, it comes with an about:config configuration utility.

Opera 10 already looks very promising, and it's just in beta phase. Though closed-source, it always managed to keep its marketshare throughout the years, it provides very good Linux support (really, I don't know many - even open-source - projects who provide installation packages for so many distributions), it comes with Flash by default, and it's very fast at rendering web pages.

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: Reviews

» Get new stories by e-mail: nightly or as they are published

« Return to the newswire homepage

  Related stories
» More like this

Comments (16)

caitlyn ·
You know, I kind of like Opera, particularly on older hardware as it is faster and slimmer than Firefox. OTOH, it isn't Open Source and it's only free as in free beer. With so many new and interesting Open Source browsers out there now I have to wonder if there is any reason to care about or use Opera at this point.
techiem2 ·
I'll add it also doesn't have the memory leaks of Firefox (hopefully they'll track all those down eventually). :P I use it for the occasional site where it behaves a little better than Firefox (some sites with flash, etc). Opera always has been a fairly decent browser in my experience. Too bad it's not FOSS.
hkwint ·
Quoting:I have to wonder if there is any reason to care about or use Opera at this point.


Personally, I'd say yes, because it's just a good browser. Normally, they fare better at supporting open standards than Firefox. Opera doesn't crash if you want to watch Flash-movies full screen, like Firefox. It doesn't stay in memory so the only way to restart it is using the killall command from the CLI, like Firefox from time to time.

Also, from time to time, ideas / features of Opera are included in Firefox as well, leading to a better experience in Firefox. Examples of those are mouse gestures (addon in Firefox), RSS reader (addon in Firefox), and status bar (addon in Firefox). The M2 mail client is quite good to, in one case it was better in connecting with Exchange then IE in a particular case.

Apart from that, it's nice to have alternatives. If somebody doesn't like the direction Konqueror or Firefox is going, they can migrate without too much hassle.

So should you care? Well, as long as Opera is around and opes source browsers work for you I guess not. But if Opera disappears, it will be a loss of competition between browsers - leading to open source browsers becoming worse at innovating.
caitlyn ·
Hans: You are making it seem like there are only two choices: Opera and Firefox. Even Mozilla has other choices now (Seamonkey, Fennec), and alternatives like Epiphany, Midori, Konqueror, Conkeror, Kazehakase, Netsurf, SkipStone, HV3, Flock, etc... Some have limited feature sets but are lightweight while others are working to become full featured.

I don't think that Opera disappearing would kill innovation. There are plenty of other innovative projects out there.
Steven_Rosenber ·
Opera = fast. I use it quite a bit.
caitlyn ·
Some of the others I listed also equal fast + FOSS.
azerthoth ·
you forgot a really fast one caitlyn, links in GUI mode (links -g).
hkwint ·
Quoting:Hans: You are making it seem like there are only two choices: Opera and Firefox.


I guess you're right at that. Those are the two 'most full-fledged' browsers available on Linux in my opinion, though Konqueror made great improvements. Probably it has something to do with my love for Opera and its 'G/Ctrl+G mode' when I was still using Windows, it was far better and faster than IE. That means I still use Opera and read about it from time to time, and therefore notice the progress they made. But they might have gotten their ideas from other browsers indeed, I don't know.
Steven_Rosenber ·
If I want a browser for my 233 MHz-era machines running either Linux or Open/Free/NetBSD, and I want that browser to have working CSS and Javascript (even if the scripts run like crap), Firefox/Iceweasel/Epiphany really bog down. Opera is the only choice. If I'm running, say, Fluxbox, Fvwm2 or even Xfce, I'm not going to go the Konqueror route, although I think Konqueror is one of the great things in KDE.
caitlyn ·
@Steven: Would Kazehakase fit the bill?
flufferbeer ·
@Steven_Rosenber I've not only also found that Opera works surprisingly well on 233 MHz-era machines with Linux, but using older versions of M$-Winbloze as well in dual-boot mode. That's right! On ancient Pentium I and Pentium II PCs from 166MHz-333Mhz, I can get Opera to run in 9x fine where I cannot do so as well with FF or even with NS's Navigator/Communicator. AAMOF, Opera seems to perform a little bitty bit better on these antique PC than does the default version of M$IE. Cannot recall seeing much a difference in speed on these pCs, though, between Opera running on Linux vs on Windloo$
bigg ·
Have you tried hv3?
caitlyn ·
@bigg: HV3 is lightning fast on older hardware. It has some limitations but it is head and shoulders better than Dillo in terms of supporting more modern web pages.
Steven_Rosenber ·
hv3 -- never heard of it ... I'll look into it.

http://tkhtml.tcl.tk/hv3.html

Turns out there's a PET package for Puppy Linux. That might be a good place to start.
caitlyn ·
Vector Linux has it in the repository as well. The Vector package does include hv3polipo (customized proxy).
chalbersma ·
h3v is nice but it's not as polished as Opera.

Post a comment

A free account is needed to post. Write your comment here first: your text is kept in this browser while you sign up or log in, and is waiting for you when you come back.

Your message:
|||||
10
Markdown: **bold**, *italic*, [text](https://link), - lists, > quotes, $x^2$ for math. Formatting help

Sign up and post (it is free)  or  Log in and post