• Opera 10 Beta: First Impressions

    Opera 10 Beta: First Impressions

    Samir Makwana, Jun 03, 2009 1822 hrs IST

    Faster, with eye candy features

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Opera has announced the first beta of Opera 10 web browser. This comes right after the Chrome 2.0 release that took place last month. Opera 10 is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris and Free BSD platforms.

The first thing that caught our eye was the new skin which was etched with crisp edges. Also, the panel display button is now placed just before the first tab. Bookmarks options smirk with heart shaped icons. After that, we got down testing and checking around the new features, as usual.

Here are our thoughts after our first experience with Opera 10 Beta:

Performance

Opera 10 touts the Presto 2.2 rendering engine to load the resource intensive pages faster. Just like the Opera 10 Preview did, this beta also scored 100/100 in Acid3 test. While running the Sun Spider test thrice, we found different results with mean of scores coming close to approximately 9700ms.





Pages loaded faster like that in Opera 10 preview (with Opera Turbo off) and flash content took a while to show up. Viewing video still gave us few lags, but the reason behind this might be our flaky Internet connection. Gmail worked like a charm which used to give trouble in earlier versions.

New Opera Turbo Settings

Right-click on the Opera Turbo icon on the bottom left corner of Opera 10 Beta and choose 'Configure Opera Turbo' to get configuration settings. New Automatic option will self-detect the slow connections and improve the browsing speeds. If you have a fast net connection, simply check the 'Off' box to turn off Opera Turbo.





Opera's one of the most novel feature is Opera Turbo, which is a server-side data compression technology. Basically, Opera's the Turbo feature makes a proxy server connection, scales down web content of the webpage and then pumps it to the users with slow Internet connection. Large images and certain content types are scaled down for faster page loads, thereby manage the bandwidth efficiently.

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Discussion Board
(5) Comments
Grim
,Bangalore, on Jun 29, 2009 09:46 PM
This really is impressive but my heart still says go with Firefox..
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Danish
,navi mumbai, on Jun 04, 2009 07:04 PM
The new look is very cool. Also drastic increase int the number of speed dial is amazing. 9.64 was like nothing infront of Mozilla Firefox but 10 can give a though fight to Mozilla.
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dude
,kochi, on Jun 04, 2009 10:48 AM
I love this opera beta! Opera turbo in the auto mode really speeds things up! Esp when u r browsing in a netbook with low wifi range!
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adisal
,Pune, on Jun 03, 2009 08:32 PM
I still like to be with Firefox! Sooner or later the features for opera will trickle into firefox plug-ins. So firefox is still the best bet considering large base of plugins and other featuers.
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follower
,_, on Jun 03, 2009 07:06 PM
Geo location is not very important. It might be in the future, but right now its of academical interest.
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