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Opera 10 Beta Continues Browser's Innovation Trend
by Jim Rapoza
Speed Dial
Like many past Opera innovations, Opera's Speed Dial—which makes it possible to view your favorite Websites when launching a new tab—has been heavily copied by competing browsers.
Site Changes
The sites shown in Opera's Speed Dial can be easily changed, deleted or customized.
Speed Dial Customization
A new feature in the Opera 10 beta is the ability to extensively customize the Speed Dial page, from controlling the layout to adding a background image.
Turbo
The new Turbo feature in the Opera 10 beta uses multiple caching and other performance techniques to improve speed for those on slow connections.
Network Performance
Opera Turbo can be configured to take action only when network performance slows.
New Look
With the Opera 10 beta, an overall new look and layout is provided for the browser.
Tab Innovations
Opera was the first browser to provide tabs, and, with the beta of Opera 10, the innovations continue with an excellent tab system that can be resized to show thumbnails of sites in tabs.
Opera Options
Opera 10 gives users the option to use cloud-based services for browser applications, such as using Web mail for mailto links, but the selection in the beta is very limited.
Standards Support
Standards support has always been strong in the Opera browser, and the beta of Opera 10 continues this tradition with a perfect score in the Acid3 test.
Search Field Resizing
Small improvements in the Opera 10 beta include the ability to resize the search field.
Updates
With Opera 10, updates will take place automatically; the current update method requires a download and full install of the new version.
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Opera has long been one of the most innovative browsers on the Web, introducing many of the features—such as tabbed browsing—now found in other browsers. While the beta of Opera 10 may not appear to be as innovative as some past versions, it does include several new features that will probably be found in competing browsers in years to come: a very good tabbed browsing interface, improvements to the innovative Speed Dial tab launch and features to boost browser performance on slow connections.