
Back in March, I reviewed the Opera Turbo Labs preview version of the Opera 10 alpha browser incorporating server-side optimization and compression technology that Opera claims can speed throughput over slow connections by reducing the amount of data needed to display Web pages by up to 80 percent — music to my ears, being stuck at present with a rural dial-up Internet connection that gives me 26,400 bps throughput on good days.
Initially skeptical, I was delighted to discover it wasn’t just hype. Opera Turbo provided such a dramatic speed boost it seems silly to use any other browser. There was some image quality degradation from the compression, but you can always turn Turbo off when you need full image resolution.
Earlier this month, Opera released the first public beta of Version 10 with the Turbo feature, joined by a raft of other enhancements. The alpha build of Opera 10 Turbo I’ve been using for three months has proved amazingly stable and bug-free, but I’ve run into some issues with Opera 10 Beta 1, especially on my Intel Mac.

But to first accentuate the positive, the new Opera 10 beta (code-named Peregrine) includes an array of other new features such as an interface facelift by designer Jon Hicks, including etch effects and border highlights, giving extra crispness to edges. Text Shadow has a new parameter to reproduce the etched text effect that is standard on OS X and some Windows applications.

The Mac default skin gets a fresh look that’s OK if you like Safari-esque gray. I don’t, and will install a skin I like better — easy to do from Opera’s large selection.
I won’t revisit the Turbo feature in great detail, since how it works was outlined thoroughly in the previous article, but a new configuration option enables an Opera Turbo setting to activate only if a slow network is detected. New in Opera 10b1 is a resizable tab bar that displays thumbnails of your open Web pages on mouseover, and can now also be used to show all open tabs as thumbnails.
Opera’s Speed Dial bookmark thumbnail feature can now be customized to suit your taste by using the “Configure” button to display from 4 to 25 favorite web sites, and you can add a custom background. (Some downloadable alternate Opera skins also include Speed Dial backgrounds.)
If you use a Webmail service as your default mail client, you can configure Opera 10 to do the same, so clicking on email addresses or the Send by Mail in Opera will open the compose page from your Webmail service provider. The same is true with the Feed reader — you can now also add any RSS/atom feed into your favorite online feed reader from within Opera 10.
Opera 10’s new Presto 2.2 browser engine is claimed to to be up to 40 percent faster on resource-intensive pages such as Gmail and Facebook, and Opera is reportedly the only browser besides Safari 4 to achieve an Acid3 100/100 score. There is also enhanced Web Fonts support, RGBA/HSLA color and SVG improvements. Spelling errors are now red underlined as you type in all fields where you can input text, using the Hunspell dictionary format. A contextual menu includes spelling suggestions, the ability to change dictionary languages, or to select additional dictionaries.
The program’s integrated Opera Mail email client now supports rich text messages including inline images, styled text, links, and/or custom HTML, and a new “Delete after X days” feature automatically removes messages from POP servers after the specified interval.
That’s a ton of new features added to what was already one of the richest feature sets of any browser.
Now for the Problems
Turning to the problems, after my first attempt at downloading an installer didn’t work (corrupted disk image that wouldn’t mount) I tried the online update feature, which seemed to install OK, but after I applied it, the browser refused to start. Frustrated, I downloaded the Intel-specific version of the installer and ran it. No joy; Opera 10 Beta 1 would still abort on startup.
Trashing the Opera Preferences and letting the program create new preference files proved the key (I made sure to save my Bookmarks and cookies files first) to getting it to launch, but my troubles weren’t over. For some reason, it refuses to load certain graphics, just displaying a placeholder, while others seem to load with no problem, and general performance doesn’t seem quite as smooth and solid as it’s been with the Opera 10 Turbo alpha.
I hasten to add that the online update worked like a charm on my Power PC Pismo PowerBook running OS 10.4.11, although the graphics non-loading glitch afflicts it there, too. Hopefully, some bugs will be squashed with the next release, and I remain a fan.
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