Opera Beta Bulks Up on Private Browsing

Opera Beta Bulks Up on Private BrowsingBy Cameron Sturdevant

The Opera 10.50 beta for Mac OS X was released on Feb. 25, advancing the underlying product with new features.

The Opera beta incorporates multitouch trackpad support. I’m shown here navigating eWEEK.com using two fingers and the trackpad on my MacBook Pro.

Private browsing, in which Opera eliminates all record of site visits, is now available in the Opera beta.

A tiny padlock icon appears in the address bar to indicate that this is a private browsing session.

Here’s the startup page with the current layout of my “Speed Dial” Web pages.

I saw a lot of this screen during my initial use of Opera 10.50b1.

Here you see that I’m performing an ego search by typing my name into the address bar. You see the search term in the blue bar just beneath.

Here you see the results page from the smart address bar search.

Opera makes it easy to find results on the page. I’ve typed in a period and entered my first name. You see the highlighted results.

While not new, there are additional widgets available to enhance the functionality of Opera.

Also not entirely new, this function uses caching and other services to speed browser sessions that might otherwise be hampered by slow connections.

Previous versions of Opera have enabled this “blown-out” version of tabbed browsing that displays thumbnails of the available Websites.

The Opera beta adds support for the Growl event notification system. You see here that Growl has recognized Opera on my MacBook Pro and is set to provide event notifications.