Speed Improvements
Although I didn’t benchmark anything, as always there’s nothing to be said about Opera’s speed. It’s still a zippy browser with a really high tech JavaScript, HTML and CSS render engine.
New Interface Skin
The new interface skin is nice, but it’s just a skin. Nothing else than esthetic changes here, although it’s also good cause you can expect Opera to operate the same way it used to before. Besides that, the new design isn’t better, neither is it worse, although I’m not really up to par with Jon Hicks’ decision of changing the bookmark icon from a Star to a Heart. I don’t know… the bookmark star just seems like an easily recognizeable international bookmark icon everybody knows about, no?
Customizeable Speed Dial
Apart from ever more burrying Google Chrome under the dirt by kind of prooving Speed Dial, or the like, was Opera’s inovation, at least in the browser space, it would have been nice to see Opera come up with a feature that allowed switching the Speed Dial behavior to something like Chrome.
Personally I don’t even like having all my top visited sites in there, but doing it manually isn’t always something people know how to do, or make the effort to do.
So, apart from that, the new customizeable capabilities of Speed Dial are nice, backgrounds and arrangeable row counts, but they’re only in presets as far as I know, which is not nice. I mean, why can’t I have a 1×3 Speed Dial, or a 16×16? I’d doubt it to be a technical limitation thing.
Oh and by the way, if you really need speedy access to 256 web sites (16 x 16), maybe you should think about using the dynamic bookmark search.
New Features
One of the nicest and probably yet another of these things you only discover by mistake after having used Opera after 5 years, unless some Opera guru shows you, is the visual tabs. At first I kind of dismissed this, because visual tab previews already existed in Opera 9.
But the new visual tabs aren’t the “usual” tab previews. You can now pull the tab bar down with a little 3-dotted handle (pretty obvious if somebody tells you actually) and open it up so that the tabs change from text-only rectangles to full-page square previews.
Although you’ll really suffer from using that feature on a small screen, aka every laptop, it’s pretty nice and visually attractive on a desktop computer. It’s really the kind of thing where people go: – Oh wow, what is that? It’s unfortunate Opera still doesn’t get that for new features like this, unless you publish an actual video and/or ad, mainstream isn’t going to know about it. Well, it’s still Beta, they have time to make a video to show it off.
Oh and it’s intuitive too, no more guessing what’s in that tab, just look at it. I actually don’t like reading off the bottom of my screen though, so I switched the tab bar to bottom, so it’s more like a giant Browser Dock.
Opera 10 Beta also includes nice improvements to mail over the alpha, and especially over Opera 9. You can finally send Rich HTML e-mails with Opera Mail. Thank you!
Should you try it?
If you’ve never tried Opera, try it it, it’s definitely worth the ride. But I have to warn you, Opera is a very technical browser and it may not be the mainstream user’s ideal. It’s incredibly satisfying for freaks like me who work on 24 inch displays, and especially for web developers, again, like me, but the browser has so much to offer you may just not find anything over Firefox or Internet Explorer (you really have to be geeky to know how to use Opera properly). Adding on that is the fact Opera has very poor support from web developer because of its frankly super minor position on the market, even behind brand new Google Chrome. This doesn’t mean Opera renders pages in a broken way, it actually renders them better than any other browser, with only Safari 4 capable of measuring against it. It just means the people who make web sites, web developers, don’t test their web site with Opera. Plugins also face poor support and apart from Flash, most web apps will tell you Opera is supported and stuff like Silverlight won’t work. But in all of that, again, you have to blame others, not Opera. Opera makes good stuff, it’s just not popular enough.
If you’re ready to dive in the fabulous world of the Opera web browser, get ready to have either Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer in backup, or maybe Safari, and on a lesser extent Chrome (as of this writing).
