Opera 10 Beta Continues Browsers Innovation Trend

by Jim Rapoza

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.

The sites shown in Opera’s Speed Dial can be easily changed, deleted or customized.

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.

The new Turbo feature in the Opera 10 beta uses multiple caching and other performance techniques to improve speed for those on slow connections.

Opera Turbo can be configured to take action only when network performance slows.

With the Opera 10 beta, an overall new look and layout is provided for the browser.

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 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 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.

Small improvements in the Opera 10 beta include the ability to resize the search field.

With Opera 10, updates will take place automatically; the current update method requires a download and full install of the new version.