Today, Opera released the latest version of it’s browser, Opera 10. This release marks a major step forward in the life of the Opera Browser, as it includes a lot of new features that have raised the bar in the browser market.
Some of the features that I loved in the new release are:
- A new way to search the browser history: In the url bar, type in
opera:historysearchand you’ll get a cool looking page (yeah, all the opera error and config pages now have a new theme, which is beautiful :smile:) with a search bar. Type in Google-esque search parameters, and Opera pops out a list of pages, with snippets of text right under the links. - An improved cache manager: Opera now intelligently manages the RAM cache, based on the amount of resources available. On modern beasts, with 2+ gigs of RAM, Opera will cache more pages, giving the user a very snappy browsing experience. On slightly older machines, with scarcity of RAM, Opera will downsize the cache, and hence conserve on resources. As a result of this improved management, the historysearch and Turbo features get a further boost.
- Opera Turbo: A new service offered by Opera, it does wonders for people like me, who access Internet through relatively slower networks, without the luxury of broadband. All traffic is transparently routed through a proxy, where all the images on a page are processed, and low res images are sent to the browser, hence reducing the bandwidth demand, and loading pages faster. For more details on the working of Opera Turbo, check this post out.
- Spell Checking finally makes it to Opera in this release. And it’s damn efficient.
- Auto Updates are now a built-in feature. Opera will check with the mother servers, and update itself automatically.
- Visual Tabs: Opera has provided tab previews for quite a long time. Hover your mouse on the tab, and a preview will pop out next to your cursor. In this release, Opera has taken this a step further, and now embeds previews in the tabs itself.
- New Themes and Icons: Opera has now redesigned the Themes and icons, and they are a nice sight.
Most of these are changes that you can see when you use Opera. There have been a lot many changes under the hood as well, with the new and improved Presto rendering engine being used in this version. This has improved the speed and response of Opera by leaps and bounds.
You can download the latest version of Opera 10 from the downloads page, or this ftp site. Currently, the Opera servers are under a heavy load, with users all around the world downloading it, so expect a slightly slow download speed for the next 1-2 days.