I’m seriously happy about Opera right now. Not only have they succeeded at keeping up with the technical updates, their browser is now finally another proud owner of a native shell on Mac.
This whole native shell movement really makes my eyes happy. Afterall, we did go from 9.6 to 10.5:
From the left to the right, Opera 9.6, Opera 10.1, Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha for Labs.
10.5 also has a nice addition, smoothly animated tabs à-la-Safari. We might see additional changes by the time this hits release, but it really makes me want to use Opera more. (Note, Opera 10.5 has other interface change niceties not covered here, but you get the gist of it; more animation and coolness, including for the first time being able to tab through checkboxes on Mac)
A note on speed
Opera Software proved once again that sheer technical expertise can surpass open source communities, as well Google on that note. On my computer, I got 393.2 ms for Opera 10.5 and 428.4 ms for Chrome 4 in the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, and it’s apparently even faster on Windows but I didn’t test that yet. Amazing.
