Opera is one of those browsers that has a very dedicated community, but pales in usage compared to Firefox and Internet Explorer.

The perks of Opera have pretty much always been the same.

• Best native tab management
• Lightning fast operation in just about every way
• Low memory usage
• A user interface that just makes sense
• More options that are actually usable

I’d dare to say that other browsers "borrow" features from Opera routinely. The Opera browser always seems to come up with something really cool but people really don’t take notice of it. Then after a while, a competing browser will introduce a very similar feature and be lauded as if they invented it.

An example of this is the zoom feature. Opera was the first browser I can remember that got zoom right the first time. Firefox didn’t get that right until version 3 and IE not until 7, both several years after Opera more or less perfected it.

The only thing about Opera that was obvious is that it looked old. The current Opera 9.64 does look a bit antiquated while IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome look snazzy and modern.

Opera 10 on the other hand finally gets a freshened interface. It’s nothing particularly groundbreaking, but considering how often we all use our web browsers, this is a welcome sight to see. There is no part of this browser that says "old" anymore.

Concerning the address bar…

The AwesomeBar in Firefox sucks. Even in FF 3.5 it’s still a drag to use. You will realize why once you use Opera’s address bar. Why? Because Opera never "thinks" when trying to pull up information. The moment you start typing, wham, instant search of your bookmarks with no "thinking". It is nothing short of amazing how fast it is (even on slow PCs!)

Concerning better web integration…

From the Opera 10 page:

If you use a Web mail service as your default mail client, you can tell Opera 10 to do the same. Clicking on e-mail addresses or "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.

This is actually really cool. But unfortunately the selections available do not include what most people use.

For example, when you click on an email address on a web page, this is what happens:

Okay, cool, I can choose a webmail service of my choice, let’s see what choices I have.

That’s it? No Hotmail? No Yahoo Mail? No Gmail? I’m hoping those services will be added in when this browser is out of beta.

Concerning the other stuff…

Opera Turbo

The Opera Turbo feature is an accelerator of sorts that is supposed to increase the speed of browsing when on a slow or choked (i.e. a slow public wi-fi) network. It is enabled by clicking the clock icon at the lower left of the browser. I can’t use it because my network is too fast (oh, darn it all). You can read more about Turbo here.

Resizable search field

At top right next to the address bar you can search Google (just like in Firefox or IE) and now you can adjust the size of it, but I bet you didn’t know that IE and FF can do the exact same thing. Opera makes it easy to spot. The other guys do that hiding-in-plain-sight thing.

Auto-update

Summed up: It’s about time Opera got this.

Would I recommend Opera now?

Opera 10 is the first version of this browser that I would actually recommend. As good as 9 and all the previous versions were, I just couldn’t recommend those. And the main reason for that is sub-par web standards support.

Version 10 on the other hand does have proper web standard support (believe me, that’s important). And as soon as the loose ends are tied up from the beta to the final release, I think this will finally be the one that will get Opera more new users.