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Two weeks after the Feb. 11 beta release of the Opera 10.5 browser for Windows, Opera Software has released a beta version of the Opera 10.5 browser for the Mac.
The new Mac beta of the speedy Opera 10.5 browser features such highlights as support for Cocoa, Apple’s Objective-C programming environment; a unified tool bar; Growl notifications; and multitouch gestures, wrote Opera employee Adam Minchinton Feb. 25.
The beta also ships with some known issues: “No support for PowerPC (PPC); possible performance issues on Mac O SX 10.4 (Tiger); minimal Java support; and some Widget keyboard and window issues.”
Other features of the Opera 10.5 beta include Opera’s new Carakan JavaScript engine, which Opera Software said runs Web applications “more than eight times faster than its predecessor.” In addition, the Mac version beta features private browsing, a spacious design, new Opera widgets, enhanced Mac integration and a smart address field.
For simplified searching, Opera 10.5 enables users to use their search engine of choice directly from the address field.
Meanwhile, according to Opera’s State of the Mobile Web Report, Google has “a commanding lead” in mobile search. “Accounting for more than 9 percent of all page views on the mobile Web in the United States, Google’s search portal easily outpaces rivals Yahoo and Bing, with 4.3 percent and 0.03 percent of all page views, respectively,” Opera Software said.
The State of the Mobile Web Report is issued monthly. Opera Software listed the following global trends found in the January 2010 report:
““- In January 2010, 50 million people used Opera Mini, a 7.4% increase from December 2009 and up 149% compared to January 2009.- Opera Mini users viewed more than 23.3 billion pages in January 2010. Since December, page views have gone up 12.7%. Since January 2009, page views have increased 208%.- In January 2010, Opera Mini users generated over 337 million MB of data for operators worldwide. Since December, the data consumed went up by 7.0%. Data in Opera Mini is compressed by up to 90%. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 3.1 PB of data in January. Since January 2009, data traffic is up 176%.- The top 10 countries for Opera Mini usage in January 2010 were: Russia, Indonesia, India, Ukraine, China, South Africa, the United States, Nigeria, Vietnam and the United Kingdom- Looking at the top 10 countries according to Opera Mini usage (in Part 2 of the report), Nigeria-in only its second month back on the list after a 3-month absence-overtook Vietnam in January.”“