10181 Opera released Opera Version 10 final on Tuesday as scheduled, and I've been wringing it out all week in production use.

As expected, the final release is a solid performing piece of work which is no surprise at all since Opera 10 has been stable and reliable since the first public alpha releases began using last spring. having been posting periodic upgrade report from the office through the betas and three release candidates, there isn't a whole lot I can add in terms of changes not already mentioned in previous articles, up I'll recap and summarize my thoughts and impressions.

Opera 10 features many enhancements, tweaks. and upgrades, including translation into 39 languages, an option to have visual tabs to the left or right of the browser window, and a fix for a problem opening PDF files. (see the changelog in the Appendix below for a full list of changes). One of Opera 10's marquee features is the new Turbo server-side optimization and compression technology that speeds up data transfer on low-bandwidth connections by reducing the amount of data that needs to be downloaded in order to view Web pages by up to 80%, providing significant improvement in browsing speeds over dialup or crowded Wi-Fi in a caf or browsing through your mobile phone while commuting.

As noted, I began using an Alpha build of Opera 10 Turbo back in March and the public betas and release candidates since early June, and can confirm that with the Turbo feature enabled it's a whole bunch faster than any other browser over my poky rural dialup Internet connection. For the fortunate many with faster connections turbo can be turned off and Opera !0 with Opera's new Presto to browser engine is a very fast conventional browser as well. It's probably not quite up to the standard of Safari 4 and Google Chrome, but it's in the ballpark, and the developer claims that 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.

Opera 10 also includes a a fresh look by designer Jon Hicks, a more refined feel, and is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. Perhaps the most obvious change is the new application icon, designed by Oleg Melnychuk. The red O will continue to represent Opera, but it has received a major facelift. It is also available in bigger sizes that before for Windows and Mac, so that you can view it in all its glory on your desktop. Actually, I haven't noticed much visual difference from the beta 3 release, which incorporated most of the interface tweaks.

New in Opera 10 is a resizable tab bar. Just drag the handle underneath the tabs to reveal thumbnails of your open Web pages. You can now also customize Opera's Speed Dial feature to suit your taste by using the Configure button to choose from 4 to 25 favorite Web sites for quick access every time you open a new tab. You can also add a custom background so you feel right at home (some downloadable alternate Opera skins also include Speed Dial backgrounds).

Web integration

If you use a Webmail service as your default mail client, you can tell Opera 10 to do the same. Clicking on email addresses or the Send by Mail in Opera will open the compose page from your Web mail 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.

Resizable search field

Get a clearer view of what you are about to search by simply expanding the size of the search field to accommodate more than two words of space.

40% Faster Engine And Cutting-edge Web Standards Support

Opera's developers have optimized the new Opera Presto 2.2 engine in Opera 10 to be much faster on resource intensive pages such as Gmail and Facebook. In addition, with an Acid3 100/100 score (reportedly the only browser besides Safari 4 to achieve that distinction), Web Fonts support, RGBA/HSLA color and SVG improvements, Opera 10 beta is ready for the next generation of Web applications.

Inline spell-check

Write freely in your Facebook wall, blog or Webmail. Opera 10 beta underlines any misspelled words. By using the Hunspell dictionary format, you can be sure you'll always have the most complete and updated list of all languages.

Auto-update

Opera 10 beta makes it easy to stay up to date with the latest version. With Auto-Update you will be able to choose completely automatic updates or have the option of being notified when an update is ready to install.

Email Client Built In

Opera Mail can now send rich text messages including inline images, styled text, links, and/or custom HTML. You can also choose to have messages deleted from your POP server after a preset number of days, to help you keep control of your hosted server space.

Automated Crash Reporting

Opera is designed to restart and recover all your tabs if a crash occurs. But, now you can easily send us a crash report to help us continue to make Opera the most stable browser around.

Opera Dragonfly evolved

Opera's Web developer debugging tool is now even better, allowing you to edit the DOM and inspect HTTP headers.

And of course, all the traditional Opera good stuff is still there, such as Opera's already excellent Download Manager which deserves special mention since it's IMHO so much better than any other browser's handling of downloads, with excellent progress monitoring and full control, including resumable downloads after a pause or shutdown, and no-hassle multiple downloads

Opera's Zoom controls are among the best if not THE best, with a handy pull-down menu and button in the lower right corner to resize Web pages. If the page is too wide for your screen, simply hit Fit to Width and Opera will resize the Web page so you avoid horizontal scrolling. I also like Opera's implementation of the sidebar, which stays out of your way until bidden to appear with a button-click, and hiding again efficiently.

If you're a regular reader, then you may be aware that I'm a big fan of Opera, and Opera 10 is the best iteration of this fast, stable, and deeply featured alternate browser. If you haven't checked it out it's worth doing so. You may become as hooked as I am.

For more information, visit:
http://www.opera.com/

Download:
http://www.opera.com/download/

Learn more about the features that make Opera unique:
http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/

Connect with Opera's development team:
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/

Find Opera on the Web

Follow Opera on Twitter:
http://www.twitter.com/opera/

Help share Opera with the world:
http://www.chooseopera.com

Become an Opera fan on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Opera-Browser/

Watch Opera's videos on YouTube:
gtwww.youtube.com/user/operasoftware/


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Appendix - Opera 10.0 for Mac changelog

Opera 10 is a recommended upgrade offering new and improved features, plus security and stability enhancements. A separate changelog listing changes since Opera 10 beta 3 is available.

New features

Auto update

Opera now includes the ability to update itself automatically when new releases become available. By default, Opera will notify the user about available updates. Users can specify that snapshot build releases of Opera should be downloaded by enabling "Download All Snapshots" in opera:config. Users can also choose not to check for updates or to automatically install updates by going to Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Security and changing the "Opera update level" (select box) to the: "Automatically install updates" setting.
Crashlogging tool

An integrated user interface for built-in crash reporting has been added to Opera. This feature automatically appears when Opera has suffered a crash and enables a user to easily report the event directly back to Opera.
Inline spell checker

Spelling errors are now indicated as you type via a dotted red underline in all places where you can input text: form fields, Opera Mail compose windows, Notes, Chat, etc. Only single-line text fields do not check spelling automatically. The spelling checker can be enabled/disabled from the context menu (right-click a text field to open this menu). The context menu also includes spelling suggestions, the ability to change dictionary languages, and the ability to select additional dictionaries for automatic download and installation. Opera uses the Hunspell dictionary format, and a US English dictionary is included by default.

Opera Presto 2.2 rendering engine

The Opera Presto rendering engine has been updated to version 2.2 further enhancing its reputation for stability and security. It is identified by the following User Agent ID string located at Help > About Opera > Browser identification:
Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.00

Opera Turbo

This new Opera feature increases your internet bandwidth speed on slow connections using data and image compression technologies. Opera Turbo uses Opera proxy servers to compress the traffic before it reaches the Opera browser on the client computer; see this Opera reference.

Get started with Opera Turbo.
Click the Opera Turbo icon located on the left side of the Status Bar to turn it on.
Clicking it again will turn it off.

Configuring Opera Turbo can easily be done to suit your browsing needs.

1. Click the dropdown arrow located to the right of the Opera Turbo icon in the the Status Bar.


2. In the menu, select "Configure Opera Turbo" to open the Opera Turbo Settings dialog box.


3. The following choices can now be made:


4. Automatic (radio button): Turbo will enable only if it detects a slow network


5. On (radio button): Optimize pages with Turbo so they load faster on slow networks


6. Off (radio button): Load pages normally


7. Notify me about network speed (checkbox): network speed indicator becomes visible within the Opera Turbo icon on the Status Bar


8. Pretty-printing of unstyled XML

Opera 10 incorporates "pretty-print XML", which is now the default styling for unstyled XML and uses the unstyledxml.css style sheet in the Styles sub-directory of the Opera installation directory.

Skin elements

New skin elements crafted by our acclaimed Web designer Jon Hicks have been applied to the Opera 10 user interface. Among them are:

1. Etch effects and border inner highlights have been applied giving extra crispness to edges.


2. Text Shadow has a new parameter. This was added to reproduce the etched text effect that is standard on OS X and many Windows applications.


3. Horizontal and vertical splitters can now be skinned.

Visual tabs

The Opera 10 Tab Bar can be used to show all open tabs as thumbnails.

If the Tab Bar is not open by default, open it in the Opera 10 user interface:

In the main Opera Tool Bar, navigate to View > Toolbars > Tab Bar.

Click the Tab Bar check box. This opens the Tab Bar in the Opera user interface.

In the Tab Bar, middle-click or double-click the drag bar [ ... ] to fully expand or collapse all open tabs into thumbnails,

or

Grab the lower border of the Tab Bar or grab the drag bar and: move it down to expand all open tabs into thumbnails to a size of your choice move it up to collapse all open thumbnails back into tabs

Functional note: The Tab Bar select box is set to "No wrapping" by default (right-click the Tab Bar, in the context menu click "Appearance", "Wrapping" is set to the "No Wrapping" selection). Changing this selection to "Wrap to multiple lines" turns off Visual tabs.

You can also turn off Visual tab thumbnails if you prefer the traditional Opera tab environment.
Right-click the Tab Bar.

In the menu, point to "Customize".

In the submenu uncheck the "Enable Thumbnails in Tabs" check box.

The Tab Bar can be moved from its default top position by using the new Tab Bar context menu option "Tab bar placement". Placing the Tab Bar on the left or right side of the Opera 10 user interface enlarges your vertical screen real estate.

Right-click the Tab Bar.

In the menu, point to "Tab bar placement".

In the submenu select any one of the following Tab Bar positions.

Top (radio button): default - places the Tab Bar at the top of the Opera 10 user interface

Bottom (radio button): places the Tab Bar at the bottom of the Opera 10 user interface

Left (radio button): places the Tab Bar at the left side of the Opera 10 user interface

Right (radio button): places the Tab Bar at the right side of the Opera 10 user interface

Improved features

Acid3 test

Opera 10 scores 100/100, pixel perfect on the Acid3 compliance test; see our Opera reference.
Opera Dragonfly

Additions to Opera Dragonfly developer tools include HTTP header inspection, DOM editing, and automatic selection of the current tab; see this Opera reference.
Opera Mail: Delete After X Days POP-only

Delete after X days automatically removes messages from POP servers after the specified number of days, which is particularly useful for users who have limited server space. This option can be enabled for POP accounts on the Incoming tab of the account settings dialog by checking "Remove from server after #days" (7 days by default). It is also possible to specify that only read messages and/or only fully downloaded messages should be removed. Warning: Disabling the latter option is dangerous for those that use low-bandwidth mode, as messages that are not completely downloaded will be removed from the server, making it impossible to retrieve the complete message.

Opera Mail: Rich Text Message Composition HTML authoring

Opera Mail can now send rich text messages including inline images, styled text, links, and/or custom HTML.
Rich text composition can be enabled by default for an account on the Outgoing tab of the account settings dialog by checking "Prefer HTML formatting". It can also be enabled on a per message basis in the message composition window.

Bold styling, italic styling, and underline styling can respectively be toggled using Ctrl-B, Ctrl-I, and Ctrl-U.
Forwarding and redirecting rich text messages is now available.

Rich text message signatures can be implemented through Tools > Mail and Chat Accounts > Manage Accounts > Edit > Outgoing > Edit signature. Click "Use HTML Formatting" (radio button).

Rich text messages with attachments are also supported.
Regular expression engine

Opera 10 has an improved and faster regular expression engine that uses a stack-based bytecode instruction set. This type of instruction set is based around a stack of values, where most instructions "pop" input operands from the value stack, process them, and "push" the result back onto the value stack. Some instructions simply push values onto the value stack, and others rearrange the values on the stack. This results in compact bytecode programs with code that is easily generated. It is a typical backtracking regular expression engine, but does some tricks to avoid redundant backtracking. These usually avoid the severe performance issues a backtracking regular expression engine can have on specific regular expressions.

Speed Dial configuration options

You can now easily configure how many speed dials will fit comfortably on your Opera desktop. Click "Configure Speed Dial" in the lower-right corner of the Speed Dial page to open the configuration dialog box. Three tools are available:
Background image

1. Browse to an image you wish to use as the background of your Speed Dial page.


2. Position this image on the Speed Dial page by selecting center, stretch, or tile.


3. Layout of your speed dials


4. Select which dial layout best suits your monitor size:


5. Small (2 x 2): renders a 4 speed dial grid


6. Normal (3 x 3): renders a 9 speed dial grid


7. Wide screen (4 x 3): renders a 12 speed dial grid


8. Large screen (4 x 4): renders a 16 speed dial grid


9. Large wide screen (5 x 4): renders a 20 speed dial grid


10. Extra large screen (5 x 5): renders a 25 speed dial grid


11. Hide Speed Dial


12. Unchecked by default, check this box to hide all speed dials.

Web specifications support

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

Support for the CSS3 color:transparent value has been improved.

Full RGBA and HSLA opacity support is now included for an easier way to make Web page features transparent. This is accomplished by the addition of a fourth argument to HSL and RGB, namely alpha transparency and results in RGBA and HSLA values. See this Opera reference.

Support has been added for the CSS Selectors API. This feature makes the selection of DOM elements a lot simpler. It includes partial support for namespace resolver features which allow you to work with mixed namespace documents and select elements based on their namespace; see this Opera reference.

CSS files must now be served with the correct MIME type ("text/css") in Strict mode, or they will be ignored.

HTML 5

HTML 5 algorithms have been implemented for detecting charsets in HTML.
HTML 5 end-tag and start-tag parsing, whitespace parsing, and DOCTYPE parsing have been added.
HTML 5> elements can now export images to the JPEG format.
HTML 5 transforms are applied when building a path, not when painting it.

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
FPS (Frames Per Second) support: Opera enables you to manipulate the speed (frames per second) of your SVG animations using JavaScript by supporting the SVGElement.currentFps and SVGElement.targetFps properties. These properties respectively read and control SVG frames per second; see this Opera reference.
SVG fonts in HTML support: Use SVG font files to style your text using CSS (in both HTML and SVG files); see this Opera reference.

Web fonts
font specification (@font-face CSS at-rules) with the font-family descriptor
src descriptor with local and remote
TrueType (TTF)
OpenType (OTF)
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) font support

Changes since Opera 9.64

User Interface

Added

• Ability to reset toolbar customization


• Resizeable search field


• Opera Turbo warning icon


• Warning and advice about why dictionaries.xml file sometimes is missing from Auto update


• A "Synchronize Opera" button in the Speed Dial page


• Tab icons (inverted) for panels viewed as tabs


• An Open Folder menu item to the file browse control


• Multiple-server support for Auto Update


• A left-click context menu to the Opera Turbo button


• A context menu option to reload images in high quality


• Widget version support


• Password Manager with context-menu support


• Translations into 39 languages including English


• Belorussian


• British English


• Bulgarian


• Chinese Simplified


• Chinese Traditional


• Croatian


• Czech


• Danish


• Dutch


• Estonian


• Finnish


• French


• Canadian French


• Frisian


• German


• Greek


• Hindi


• Hungarian


• Indonesian


• Italian


• Japanese


• Korean


• Lithuanian


• Macedonian


• Norwegian Bokml


• Norwegian Nynorsk


• Polish

Portuguese

• Brazilian PortugesePortugueseli>Romanian


• Russian


• Serbian


• Slovak


• Spanish


• Latino Spanish


• Swedish


• Turkish


• Ukrainian


• Improved


• Resized the Mac Add-tab icon


• Changed the way Widgets are launched after an installation on Mac


• "Remove From Toolbar" and other toolbar customization options moved into a submenu


• Allowed Speed Dial to have a custom favicon


• Implemented a progressive disclosure control on "Report a site problem" dialog box


• All submenus are now given icons from the skin


• Pressing Enter to select an item in a dropdown box no longer submits a form


• Enabled tab thumbnails check box by default in Customize dialog box


• Notification now shown when Opera Turbo servers are busy


• Improvements to hover state on tabs (better contrast) and tabs on the side


• Panels viewed as Tabs now have their own favicon and thumbnail image


• Images appended after page load will now display until "screen refresh"


• Updated appearance of standard-skin dialog boxes


• Images to be used as desktop background are only saved in the user's profile pictures folder

Fixed

• Web fonts affecting Mac


• Text overlaps in Visual tabs


• Aborting the printing of a Web page


• Opera Turbo "Automatic" mode not being reflected in the status field


• Translated strings in Romanian not fitting the error-report and Appearance dialog boxes


• Tiled background in Speed Dial not being remembered


• Internet-to-Intranet override polishing


• Setting Opera Turbo through the Details dialog box


• Opera continuously opening tabs if choosing "Opera Internet Browser" and "Remember choice" in the BitTorrent Client Selection dialog


• BT download dialog box now inherits most of the functionality from the download dialog, including the Save functionality


• Creating a search when right clicking on a search text field


• Yahoo! mediaplayer in learnenglish.de


• Spatial navigation on the Yahoo! frontpage


• Saving a picture that has not been fully downloaded


• Uninstalling a dictionary


• Session not being saved when closing Opera


• Downloading a new .torrent file with Opera Turbo enabled


• The Wikipedia Cortado Java Theora player working in Opera 10


• Posting/loading of links on a wall at Facebook


• SVG background images disappearing on hover


• Switching to English when auto updating


• Problem with the nytimes.com page while closing Opera


• System-wide settings not being read


• Display of Visual tab thumbnails when page uses bitmap fonts


• Wrong name being listed for Azureus in the BitTorrent Client Selection dialog box

Renamed
• "Transfers" to "Downloads"
• "Wand" to "Password Manager" (Tools > Advanced > Password Manager)

Mail, News, Chat

Added

• "Delete after X number of days" facility


• Horizontal scrollbars in e-mails


• A recovery mechanism for corrupt mail databases


• Additional online feed readers to the feed preview page


• Keyboard shortcuts for Go to Thread: D, Watch Thread: Ctrl-D, and Ignore Thread: Ctrl-Shift-D


• A thread button to the message list toolbar


• A dialog to warn about the mail database consistency check


• Several icons to the Compose menu

Improved

• Adding links to HTML e-mails


• Sent e-mails show when using threading in the e-mail client


• Removed the encoding mismatch dialog


• Threaded messages sorted by date now sorted by the last arrived message instead of the first


• Right-to-left (RTL) text improvements:


• autodetection of RTL


• sending of RTL HTML messages


• replying to RTL messages should reply in RTL ++


• HTML e-mail composition


• Clicking on a new message notification when:


• trying to find a window where the message is visible


• trying to open unread if it is visible there


• trying to open the account view if it is not visible there

Fixed

• Mail compose issues


• Double-clicking a note to insert into mail when replying


• 8 bit not being the default content-transfer encoding


• Opera Mail welcome message encoding and other strings


• HTML keyboard shortcuts working in plain text mode


• Chat connection status for multiple accounts


• Plain text e-mail composing


• Printing mail which resulted in an empty page


• Ability to paste into inline find in mail view


• Decoding error when writing an HTML mail with a non-ASCII character


• Text not fitting in several dialog boxes when switching to the Romanian language


• Signature not changing when changing an account

Display and scripting

Added

• W3C Selectors API support


• Basic Web font support:


• font specification (@font-face CSS rule) with the font-family descriptor that controls font choices


• src descriptor with local and remote


• Truetype (ttf) and Scalable Vector Graphics (svg) font support


• Support for SVGElement.currentFps and SVGElement.targetFps properties to read and control SVG frames per second


• An "Open Folder" menu item to the file browse control

Improved

• Full RGBA support


• Ojects returned by getClientRects() and getBoundingClientRect() renamed to ClientRectList and ClientRect instead of TextRectangle and TextRectangleList


• XMLHttpRequests now trigger start-loading/end-loading events


• Removed proprietary window.setDocument method


• Load event for scripts now sent after the script execution rather than before


• Load event now sent to frame/iframe/object elements before being sent to the document


• Highlights no longer added when HTMLElement.focus() is called unless keyboard navigation is already activated


• Web fonts loaded in memory and the font name being retrieved


• FormatBlock now correctly affects ancestors of the contentEditable element


• browser.js can now be disabled when doing Auto update


• DOMContentLoaded now fires when traversing history


• Support for getting localized strings from JavaScript


• Max values now set for the automatic memory cache

Fixed

• getElementsByClassName which now works with multiple classes in className


• Hardcoded strings in XML files


• Scope when defining getter for the HTMLElement document prototype


• Recursive regular expression causing stack exhaustion


• An issue with TinyMCE and Opera Dragonfly


• Network

Added

• A link on the error page for cross-network communication

Improved

• Network access for widgets is now opt-in


• All existing widgets must be updated to have network access


• All widgets on widgets.opera.com given Internet access


• Network access specified using the network attribute of the widget element:


• Widgets using will have Intranet access only


• Widgets using will have Intranet and Internet access

Security

Added

Support for TLS 1.2
• Full set of padlock icons for security dialog box
Improved
• Anti-spoof checking and prevention of spoofing of services

Changed

• Phased out root certificates using MD2 signatures; see our advisory


• Removed support for SSL v2 and weak ciphers


• Fixed


• Issue where sites using revoked intermediate certificates might be shown as secure; see our advisory


• Issue where the collapsed address bar didn't show the current domain; see our advisory


• Some IDNA characters not correctly displaying in the address bar; see our advisory


• Issue where Opera accepts nulls and invalid wild cards in certificates; see our advisory


• Recognizing EV certificates issued directly from the Root


• Importing certificates

Miscellaneous

Added
• Support for the altGlyph element in SVGs
• Support for 32-bit alpha in BMP and RLE-encoded BMP images
• A placeholder in Opera Turbo for plug-ins that are not loaded yet
• Functionality for switching Opera Turbo mode off for separate image elements

Improved

Image downloading

• http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40 namespace no longer recognized or supported as an alias of http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml


• Files generated by the Opera installer use same naming scheme across different platforms


• Removed support for UTF-32 encoding


• User JS files now executed in alphabetical order rather than file system order


• Now possible to add Opera Turbo configuration files per language

Fixed

• Gmail problems


• A problem with Facebook chat


• Several memory leaks


• Several stability issues


• Loading an automatically saved session


• Various dialogs with third-party mouse plug-ins installed


• High memory use related to the disk cache on large torrents


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Charles W. Moore

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