Opera has released the Opera Browser 10 beta version. The new browser certainly has lots of notable improvements over its predecessors. The browser sports a improved user inteface design, customizable speed dial and Opera Turbo, a feature you will love, if you are having slow internet connection. And, an Email client/Chat is comes built-in with Opera browser. So, now you can check your emails, chat to your friends with out leaving your browser.
And there some good news for web developers too. Opera based web development/debugging tool Dragonfly is improved in this beta release to add support DOM editing and HTTP monitoring. Apart from that, the Opera 10 beta has a 100/100 pass rate on the Acid 3 test.
Notable improvements in Opera 10 Beta version:
- Visual tabs – this is really a interesting feature. Your browser tabs no longer needs to contain just page titles. Instead, a thumnail of the page itself can be seen on the Opera tab. To see the page thumnails in the tabs, you just need to extend the tab handles.
- Opera Turbo – using a compression technique, Opera browser improves the connection speed to about 3x to 4x.
- Customizable Speed dials – now the number of thumbnails in the speed dial page can be configured based on your monitor resolution. And, if you like, you can even set a background image to the speed dial page.
- Built-in Email client – you can configure your email account (POP, IMAP) in Opera’s built-in email client. Now reading emails, composing them, maintaining contacts all are possible in Opera browser itself.
Something in the store for web developers too!
If you are a big fan of Dragonfly, the Opera gives you the ability to inspect DOM and HTTP headers with the improved version of Dragonfly. “Network tab” has been added to Dragonfly, using which you can monitor the data communication between your servers and the client. This is very useful if you are developing AJAX web applications. And on the ‘DOM editing’ as quoted in the website:
One of the key new features of Opera Dragonfly alpha 3 is DOM editing support. There are two modes — the first allows you to edit, add and delete attributes and text nodes in real time. You can activate this by double clicking on an attribute, value or text node. The second mode allows you to do freeform editing, such as adding new DOM nodes. You can activate this by double-clicking on the opening or closing tag of an element. This will turn the entire element and its children into a freeform text field.
The Opera 10 beta version can be downloaded from this page.
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