Opera 10 Alpha Passes Acid 3 Test

[Osiris]

Opera 10 Alpha Passes Acid 3 Test

A first alpha preview of the upcoming web browser Opera 10 has been released by the Opera development team. Among the most notable difference to previous versions is that the browser is passing the Acid 3 test with a score of 100/100. Opera 10 makes use of the new Presto 2.2 rendering engine which improves speed, performance and security significantly.
The Opera team speaks of a 30% speed increase over the previous version of the rendering engine. A test of the JavaScript performance of Opera 10 revealed astonishing results. Opera 10 completed the
Web Browser Javascript Benchmark in 188ms which is very fast compared to Firefox 3.0.4 which needed 349ms, Safari 3.1.2 with 344ms or Opera 9.52 with 420ms. It's obviously not fair to compare a development release with web browsers who have already been released but it should give anyone an understanding about the performance increase in this new Opera version.
What else is new in Opera 10? Opera 10 adds a long requested inline spellchecker and an interesting auto-update function which can update Opera automatically whenever a new version has been released.

Web developers will like the support of web fonts, SVG and opacity through RGBA and HSLA. The current release schedule aims for a beta in early 2009 and a final release of Opera 10 later that year.
Interested users can download the Opera 10 alpha release for Windows, Linux or Mac.

 

[KSoD]

woof!

I am all over this. Downloading now for isntall.

Alright first thoughts.

Great work. But can tell it is a alpha.

1. Has a spell checker inline now like Firefox. Great news.
2. Loads fast. New engine is good. But gets stuck.
I had to stop it from loading something on this page then it would load it and the it ran great. I think it was more due to my speed dial than anything. Once i disengaged that it runs fantastic.

Will get a review of it up soon.

 

[KSoD]

Peregrine takes flight... Opera 10.0 Alpha 1 is here!

It seems like yesterday we released Opera 9.6 and now you can all get your hands on Opera 10.0. Rather than ramble on, here's a quick list of what's new:

Presto 2.2 Engine
Performance boost
100/100 and pixel-perfect on the Acid3 test
Auto-update
Inline spelling checker
Opera Mail improvements, including rich text composition and delete after X days
Widget Improvements on Linux

Can't wait to get your hands on Opera 10.0 Alpha 1, then get it now!

Download
Windows
Windows Classic
Macintosh
Macintosh (Intel-only)
UNIX


What's New
Below is an overview of the new functionality in Opera 10.0 Alpha 1.

Presto 2.2 Engine

Opera 10.0 Alpha 1 includes Presto 2.2 (Kestrel includes Presto 2.1.1), an updated version of Opera's Core. Presto 2.2 features numerous new features and loads of bug fixes, such as:

100/100 and pixel-perfect on the Acid3 test
New regular expression engine, which greatly improves performance
Improved CSS performance
Pretty-printing of unstyled XML
Web font support
RGBA and HSLA support
Selectors API support

Auto-update
The long awaited auto-update functionality is here! That's right, Opera will now update itself as new versions are released. And for those of you who want every single snapshot release just enable the "Download All Snapshots" setting (opera:config#AutoUpdate). Please be aware that if you do so, you will be upgrading to all snapshots - and as you know: snapshots contain the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes and data loss situations. In fact, they may not work at all. You have been warned


Inline Spelling Checker
Opera now checks your spelling as you write! The inline spelling checker is enabled by default for multi-line edit fields and this Alpha comes with a US English dictionary. Use the context menu of input fields to change the settings, and to correct spelling errors. See the detailed changelog for information about using other dictionaries.

Opera Mail Improvements
Rich Text Composition
Opera Mail can now send rich text messages! You can insert inlined images, styled text, links, custom HTML, and more! You can also forward and redirect rich text messages or reply to them with styled text.
In the account settings select "Prefer HTML formatting" in the outgoing tab so that you can start writing rich text mails by default in our WYSIWYG editor!

Remove from server after X days (POP-only)
This new feature is for our POP users with limited server space. Opera Mail can now remove messages from the server that have been there for X days. Of course you can limit Opera Mail to only remove read messages from the server, and/or only fully downloaded messages, which works great in combination with low-bandwith mode.

Other Changes
When viewing a message, the message subjects are now a text field again instead of a button. We have added also a "Thread" button to the message list toolbar to make some features more visible.

Widget Improvements on Linux/UNIX
We have added experimental support for true transparency for widgets on Linux/UNIX. For this to work you have to have an X Server that provides a 32-bit visual device and a running composite manager. If you start Opera from a terminal it will print this message if it detects a suitable 32-bit visual device: "(experimental) ARGB visual detected: Use '-visual 0x6f' to activate it".

If you have a composite manager running you can then try it out by starting Opera with: "opera -visual 0x6f" (0x6f may be another number on your machine).