Opera 10 Beta 3 on Mac OS X. Click the image for a larger view.
Opera software has released the third beta of its Opera 10 web browser. Opera 10 introduces a major visual change for Opera fans and brings quite a few new features to the table, including a visual tab switcher, improved JavaScript performance and a faster Opera Turbo feature.
You can grab the latest pre-release beta of Opera 10 from the downloads page. It’s a free download for Mac, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and a few other operating systems.
The latest beta release adds some more options to what Opera calls “visual tabs.” Visual tabs show up in the expandable bar just below your browser tabs. Either pull down the tab bar or double-click the handle to reveal visual thumbnails of all your open tabs. Previous betas lacked the new visual tab switcher and beta 3 adds a new option to have your tab bar on either the left or right side of the window. To get to the new options, just right-click the tab bar and choose “Customize.”
Opera is also claiming some performance enhancements for the third beta, specifically in JavaScript performance. While Opera 10 beta 3 felt pretty snappy in our casual testing, pitting it against Firefox in the SunSpider Javascript test revealed a considerable performance gap. Firefox 3.5 blazed through the tests in 1250.6ms, while Opera 10 took 4794.8ms.
This is curious, especially at a time when more complicated web applications are demanding faster and better JavaScript performance from the latest releases of web browsers. Opera has always been a fast browser, and we expected more. However, since this is a beta release, we will reserve judgment until the final browser arrives and we can run some more formal tests. Plus, Opera is working on a brand new — and reportedly much faster — JavaScript engine called Carakan, which should see the light of day soon. This release uses Opera’s current Futhark engine.
While Opera 10 may not have the best JavaScript engine on the block, it does offer something most other browsers don’t, the so-called Opera Turbo feature which optimizes webpages for slow connections. Turbo speeds up page loads by routing your requests through a proxy server, compressing the images and the page code before serving the pages to you. It was made for mobile users, but regular desktop users requested it as well, so Opera built it into its flagship desktop browser. Opera 10 reportedly has a much improved version of Turbo, though without a slow connection to test it on, it’s hard to say how much faster it is in this release.
Opera also continues its pioneering support for web standards. Opera 10 beta 3 scores 100/100 on the Acid3 test and adds support for CSS 3 features like web fonts, RGBA/HSLA color definitions and some SVG rendering improvements.
There’s one thing you won’t find in beta 3 is the much-hyped Opera Unite — the web server built in to the browser. So far Unite remains an alpha release and Opera hasn’t set a timeline for when it will officially arrive in Opera.
While the third beta of Opera 10 may not have enough to entice fans of other browsers to give it a try, it does have enough improvements to make it worth the upgrade for Opera fans. And as has been the case with the previous to betas, Opera 10 is certainly one of the best looking browsers out there.
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The coming HTML5 specification has several tools that take HTML well beyond its humble beginnings as a markup language and give web developers some powerful scripting tools. The W3C, the group that oversees the development of HTML5, has just published a draft spec of yet another powerful tool — the HTML5 File API.
