Flawless Acid3 Opera 10 Browser Beta Launched

Author	Gordon Kelly
Published	5th Dec 2008

Flawless Acid3 Opera 10 Browser Beta Launched

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You have to give it to Opera, the precocious browser maker doesn't half rattle out the upgrades and most of the time there's pretty solid stuff behind each new iteration - no more so than now...

Likely sending die-hard fans into a creamy lather (and we seem to have an uncommonly high number of them judging by the TR comment sections) is the first public alpha of 'Opera 10'. A milestone release for the Norwegian company, the jump to double digits has seen a whole host of useful, innovative and about-time-too additions so let's break them down...

First up the pesky Acid3 test and Opera becomes the first company to claim a highly significant 100/100 perfect score (by comparison Firefox 3.0.4 manages 71/100, Chrome 79/100 and as for IE - don't even go there). In theory this should mean the browser will correctly render every page on the Web, including upcoming next generation applications.

On top of this is the Presto 2.2 engine which claims to be 30 per cent faster than v2.1 in Opera 9.6, as well as being more stable and secure. Then there comes a raft of useful and much needed additions such as inline spell check, auto-updates and full html formatting in Opera Mail. Web developers also get a boost as the Presto 2.2 engine supports Web Fonts and SVG, opacity through RGBA and Dragonfly debugging for sites that includes HSLA and DOM editing and HTTP header inspecting (*stares blankly* Huuuuuuugooooooo!).

As you might expect, a release date for a finished version of Opera 10 hasn't been announced yet so the particularly timid amongst you may want to wait. Everyone else rejoice in the fact that a) Opera just got significantly better and b) other browsers now have to up their game...

Link:
Opera 10 alpha

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marinus said on 6th December 2008

Spell checker? A bit faster? I love Opera but this isn't going to stop their slide in market share.
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Dark of Day said on 6th December 2008

there are loads of options for global or site specific enabling/disabling java scripts, as well as for this that and the next thing (tools>preferences or tools>quick preferen... more

Xiphias said on 7th December 2008

@marinus:

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purephase said on 7th December 2008

@basicasic

Thanks for the tip - I will revert to 9.2 for my banking!

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