It’s been years since I’ve used the Opera browser, but the latest beta version offers at least one tempting reason to switch: it’s fast. Really fast. So fast that it just smokes every other browser on the OS X platform.
It’s all thanks to Opera’s new JavaScript rendering engine, Carkan, and a new vector graphics library called Vega that handles all the graphics rendering. Seth Weintraub runs the math over at Computerworld, but the bottom line is that Opera 10.5 beta is about 10 percent faster at rendering pages than the previous champ, Safari 4.
Other improvements in this version include:
• Stabilization Improvements: You will find that this build is much more stable than the pre-alpha build.
• More polished user interface: The whole UI is more polished now. We’re still not done yet, and expect more polishes and improvements in the builds to come.
• Opera Unite: Opera Unite now works with this release. You can browse through and download unite apps through the Unite Apps Repository.
• HTML5 : This beta now supports the html5 tag.
• Widgets as standlone apps: We’ve already talked about widgets as standalone apps, but this functionality was till now, only available in windows builds. Now even in this build of 10.50 beta for mac, you can use widgets as standalone apps.
• New Developer Tools Menu: You can go to ‘View->Developer Tools’ Menu to access common and usefull tools for developers, such as Opera Dragonfly, cache information, the error console, the source code of the page, and more.
Ever since Firefox came along, using Opera user on the desktop has been something of an individualist affectation, like wearing a monocle and sipping on absinthe while watching the game at your local sports bar. But these are real results: Opera’s not only smoking the competition in terms of rendering, but they’re still coming up with new, innovative browsing features.
The latest beta’s excellent speed increases is a great reason to become reacquainted with the most esoteric of major web browsers. You can download it here
