The Hickensian

With just 2 months shy of completing my first year with Opera, I’m really chuffed to see a final release of Opera 10 desktop, with some of the fruits of those labours.

Amongst the new features of Opera 10 are:

• Turbo – compresses pages to speed up slow connections:

• Thumbnail tabs – put them at the bottom, the sides, or just leave them at the top.
• Completely revised ‘skin’, with every icon replaced. Originally, these were updates that I was planning for v11, but I was itching to update the skin. This was quite an undertaking (and something I decided rather late on) but worth it.
• Updated rendering engine: 100% score on the Acid 3 test, web fonts (including SVG fonts) and much more.
• and of course, a new icon (at last!) created by Oleg Melnychuk

The excellent Dev.Opera article The Opera 10 Experience gives you the full details.

If you trying Opera for the first time, it’s worth making you aware of other pre-v10 features you may not be aware of that I particularly enjoy:

- Lock tabs. Right click a tab and choose ‘lock tab’ – wonderful for tabs you don’t want to be closed accidentally – When viewing pages, such as search results, keep hitting that space bar. When you get to the end of the page, Opera will follow the ‘next’ link. – Save text snippets with reference to their original page. Highlight the text on the page and choose ‘Copy to note’ from the right click menu, and it does just that. The note itself also acts as bookmark back to the source.

As with all software, it’s never really finished. So as I look with pride at version 10, I’m also mentally creating a list of what I need to work on next. We’ve come far with version 10 though, and the list can wait – at least for today.

Download Opera 10 at http://www.opera.com/browser/, or if the server is struggling with the demand, direct from ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/. Enjoy!