Opera 10.00 Available

It's been a long time coming, but it is finally here. Opera 10.00 is available for download. At first glance, it appears to me that it was worth the wait. I have installed it on Windows XP Professional and Ubuntu 9.10, and will be installing it on the various other Linux distributions as soon as I have the opportunity. Therein lies the first big advantage, by the way - "Opera Link" provides an easy way to keep your browsers synchronized on various partitions, computers and platforms. No more having to remember to add bookmarks in several different places, or having to go through the tedium of exporting and importing bookmarks.

The highlight of this release for me, though, is the improvement in "Speed Dial", which has long been my favorite feature in Opera. I have said previously that I wished they would allow more than nine speed dial tabs, and apparently I was not the only one saying that. The new version allows from 4 to 25 Speed Dial tabs! Hooray!

They have also added "Visual Tabs", which are little preview windows which pop up when you hover the mouse on an Opera tab. This is similar to what Vista does with task bar tabs, but it is much faster (duh, that wasn't difficult), and will be very welcome for those who keep a lot of tabs open most of the time.

Opera themselves seem to think that "Turbo Browsing" is the major improvement in 10.0. I haven't been trying it long enough to really say for sure, but I will say that Opera 9.64 was already so fast that if this new release is even faster then they have really accomplished something.

I've said this a number of times before. If you haven't tried Opera yet, have a look at it. You might like it. A lot. I do.

jw 2/9/2009