New features, new speed and new surprises await
June 3, 2009 – Oslo, Norway
Opera today released the first beta of Opera 10, the newest version of the company’s industry-defining Web browser. Opera 10 beta sports a surprising array of new features, a fresh look and feel, and enhanced speed and performance. Discover a better way to enjoy the Web by trying Opera 10 beta. It is completely free for Windows, Mac and Linux users from http://www.opera.com/next/.
Opera Turbo cures the bandwidth blues
If you have ever waited on dial-up, slammed hard into a bandwidth cap imposed by your ISP, or gotten stuck on a crowded Wi-Fi hot spot, Opera Turbo is here to rescue you. Using state-of-the-art compression technology, Opera Turbo unclogs your connection so you can get to your content. Opera Turbo easily delivers 3x to 4x the speed of slower connections and can offer broadband-like speeds on dial-up.
An interface-lift
A world-renowned designer Jon Hicks (see: twitter.com/hicksdesign) joined Opera to spice up our user interface design. “Initially, we were just going to clean-up some elements and focus on the interface for new features,” said Jon Hicks. “But, over time, the new user interface elements became so different that we decided to update everything. Mac users in particular should enjoy this update to the default Opera skin.” The new skin is a work in progress and will continue to evolve before the final release of Opera 10.
Tabbed browsing update from the original pioneers
The tab bar is now resizeable, but with a twist. Pull down the tab bar (or double-click the handle) to reveal full thumbnails of all your open tabs.
Opera Speed Dial just became your Speed Dial
Speed Dial has been a favorite of Opera fans since its introduction, and now you can personalize it. Have a large monitor? Super-size your Speed Dial with a 5×5 grid. Want to see your family or friends in every new tab? Add their smiling faces as a background image. Our new Speed Dial is now as flexible for you as it is fast.
The application integration trifecta
Opera comes standard with an e-mail client, newsfeed readers and BitTorrent support within the browser. In Opera 10, you can now easily choose to use a variety of Web-mail providers, online feed readers or other BitTorrent clients as your default choice.
Performance and Web standards: Opera’s cornerstones
Even without Opera Turbo, Opera 10 is now much faster on resource intensive pages such as Gmail and Facebook and is more than 40% faster than Opera 9.6. Web developers can enjoy Web Fonts support, RGBA/HSLA color and new SVG improvements.
Web developers can also take advantage of the new features in Opera Dragonfly, our set of on-board Web development tools. Opera Dragonfly alpha 3 now allows you to edit the DOM and inspect HTTP headers and comes in more than 36 languages.
But wait, there’s more…
Opera 10 beta also improves upon existing features in the Opera 10 alpha. The inline spell-checker now supports 51 languages, using the popular open source Hunspell dictionary format. Opera 10 beta also updates automatically, although you can choose to allow completely automatic updates or to be notified when an update is ready to install. We always let you stay in control.
The e-mail client is also improved with rich text editing including inline images, styled text, links, and full HTML. You can also have Opera automatically delete e-mails from your POP server after a specified amount of time to keep your inbox nice and neat.
What our CEO says:
“Your Web browser is the most important piece of software you will ever use,” says Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. “We think Opera 10 will redefine how you can enjoy the Web. We have more surprises on the way, but when you try the features, enjoy the acclerated performance and get a glimpse at our shiny new wrapping, I think Opera 10 beta will excite both long-time users and those new to Opera.”