Opera 10 has hit the release candidate status. “The Opera 10 release candidate is feature complete, with a surprising array of new features, a fresh look and feel, a new application icon, and enhanced speed and performance. Opera 10 features Opera Turbo, the new bandwidth-booster for slow Internet connections. It also features a significantly improved Opera Mail, Opera’s built-in e-mail client. Tabbed browsing enters the next phase of its evolution with resizeable, thumbnail tabs. The upgrade of Opera’s Speed Dial now gives users a chance to personalize their favorite online destinations and the overall look and feel of their start page. Finally, Opera has always been about speed and performance. Opera 10 is now much faster on resource intensive pages such as Gmail and Facebook and is more than 40% faster than Opera 9.6. Web developers can enjoy Web Fonts support, RGBA/HSLA color and new SVG improvements.”
I, for one, am excited.
Here is the link to the feature overview with visuals:
http://www.opera.com/browser/next/
Finally there will be speed dial customizations.
I may be late on this one, but I’m glad I can have one less major reason to have qt3 compatibility laying around.
Now if Opera would pick up the pace with their CSS3 borders, backgrounds and columns support to keep Firefox and WebKit on it’s heels.
No HTML5 video / audio, no CSS3 borders, backgrounds, rotation, gradients or anything the other browsers now have?
Colour me dissapointed and unimpressed.
Javascript and CSS needs some work. If I could use it I would. Of course on Mac OS X I say the same thing about Omniweb.
Running it right now; its a real improvement over previous Opera 10 beta’s and the stability has improved dramatically. On Snow Leopard (build 10A432) it is very stable – although the interface is a little out of place it doesn’t take away from its leanness and speed. All the websites I’ve used so far loads without any problems which is a good sign
Long time Opera liker and been using Opera 10 since the very earliest alphas.
Whilst 10 is a big welcome improvement, especially to the mail client, which is actually very usable now.
Opera was always lightening fast, sadly 10 isn’t. It’s noticeably slower than Chrome and Firefox 3.5 – I’m guessing it’s way faster than IE8 but then I could code my own web page faster than IE8 could render it!
Opera isn’t as fast as I think it should be, nor as fast (relatively) as it once was, sure faster than 9.6 – but that wasn’t hard. It also eats ram at an alarming rate and I’m hoping that this RC might address that and the memory freeing on quit (on my machine it takes the best part of 4 minutes to actually quit and release all it’s allocated memory)
Good – it most certainly is:
Fast – it most certainly is NOT.
But I do still like it.
Opera’s rendering speed is what made me switch to opera 9 some 2 years ago. It was 2-5 times faster than the second faster (that was against firefox 2, safari 2, IE7 beta and without chrome). But what made me stay was the little things that end up making your browsing a lot faster. My personal favorite is searching any site you want from inside the search bar.
The truth is that, speedwise, Opera was left behind. Apple became serious about Safari, Google entered the fray, Microsoft was forced to improve and Firefox rolled out a huge upgrade (in my opinion Firefox 2 was a piece of s***).
You also have to take into account that their current JS engine was not optimized for speed but for low memory usage. They are working now on a new engine which they claim that is 2.5 times faster than their current one with a lot more speed improvements coming. Check http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2009/02/04/carakan for more info. I hope we will see it in the next major update.
Great news about Opera Turbo. There’s still about 1 million dial-up Internet users here in the UK. One elderly couple in particular I’d like to pursuade to get cheap ADSL, but failing that they will need a good browser suited to slow dial-up on their new PC.
So what do you reckon? Does Opera Turbo make Opera 10 the best browser for them (once it’s released)? How does it compare with Firefox 3.5 with the dial-up friendly extensions? Anyone done some tests? i.e. will a typical 33KB phone line using Opera Turbo out-pace Opera with Turbo disabled on a 128KB connection?
Also, will it speed the downloading of emails for them as well, using the integrated email client?
Opera Turbo is just a proxy. Your Internet could be routed via Lithuania, or just about anywhere. The speed gain comes from the compression of the images on pages, so a dial-up user would see some speed gain, but getting an ad blocker too would help massively.
Opera Turbo does not function on https pages, and it wouldn’t speed up e-mail as there’s nothing to compress (attachments are already ZIP, or photos you actually want full quality unlike background images on webpages)
Is anyone actually using visual tabs and finding them a worthwhile feature?
So far most of the Opera users I know have played with them, commented on how neat they look, then turned them off for good.
To me they seem like a pointless gimmick that definitely aren’t worth the space they take. Open so many tabs that finding a particular one is an issue and the thumbnails will be squashed beyond recognition anyway.
Compared with certain unsung Opera window management features, like being able to filter the tabs displayed in the windows panel, and visual tabs seem like a damp squib.
It’s a great browser, but I can’t say I’m blown away by the new features in 10.
The problem I’ve had with visual tabs is simply that the premise behind them is redundant when hovering over the normal tab already displays a thumbnail. That said though, you can move them to the side of the screen now, which may present some usefulness for those on wider displays.
My major personal gripe with Opera 10 thus far has been the underwhelming new look, and also since a few builds ago, the dropping of the option of a native QT4 look (which admittedly while far from usable, nonetheless led me to think I might get an Opera that looked native in KDE).
The theoretical advantage of displaying multiple thumbnails is that you can find the page you’re looking for with a quick glance along the bar. Mousing over each tab to display the thumbnail is obviously a lot slower. In reality, with the tiny little thumbnails to squint at, I don’t see much of an advantage over text.
I consider the pop-up thumbnails to be pretty useless too. By the time I’ve moused over the tab bar I could have cycled though the tabs using ctrl+tab/right-mouse-button+scroll-wheel and viewed the actual pages.
I don’t really see how that would make it any more useful; it’s just wasting less valuable space. Thumbnails would still get squashed as soon as the tab bar filled up, and down a widescreen display there’s even less room. The windows panel in the sidebar makes far better use of that space in my opinion. Maybe an option to display thumbnails in that would be more useful, thanks to it’s filtering and scrollbar…
I have a sorta “on-and-off” relationship with this feature. It’s useless on top of the window and tabs are smaller and more efficient there.
On the other hand when I keep them on left-side of the window and reduce the width to minimum, they become extremely useful and efficient especially when there are multiple pages. For instance, for those who engage in tab-launching frenzy, the thumbnail tells you the site while the title tells you the content (in case of OS News).
As for Opera 10; the only noticeable change for me is the logo – and thank god for that, the older logo looked oddball in any operating system.