Coming towards the end of 2008, Opera has released to the public the new kid on the block - Opera 10 Alpha, as an early Christmas present to Opera users and fans. Packed several features, especially with the much anticipated Presto 2.2 rendering engine, everyone must be dying to test out this new browser on their system. The new rendering engine provides improvement to the browser in terms of speed, stability, support for new generation Web standards as well as several other key features. With Presto 2.2, it was mentioned that it gave a 30% speed improvement on resource intensive pages, such as GMail and Facebook.
As this release is still considered to be an alpha version, it is highly recommended not to run this on production machines. The beta release is expected to be revealed some time early next year with the final release towards the mid and end of the year.
After trying out Opera 10 Alpha briefly on my system; here is my 5-cent worth of personal opinion. As mentioned earlier, the browser does speed up impressively on-the-fly when accessing resource-intensive pages; if I understand correctly, they refer to Javascript pages and sites that run heavily on AJAX.
Having tested out several other browsers myself, I do have some concern about its limitations too. For example, try accessing Microsoft Hotmail; and you will realise that Opera failed to access certain folders. This is a common issue for other non-Microsoft browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome; thus, this did not lift my expectation for Opera to resolve that. In addition, I do notice something strange with this Opera version working on WordPress. There seem to be some kind of misalignment of output on the screen, resulting in awkard view.
Apart from those issues above, Opera 10 is still something to look out for. Don’t forget, it’s still an infant during its Alpha development phase. Let’s hope the beta release is somewhat better.
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Opera 10 Alpha
