Opera Picks up Steam With Speedy 10.0 Beta 3

From DailyTech: Over the last few years Opera, a veteran player in the browser industry, has been turning heads by delivering increasingly user-friendly products. While such praise is typically lavished on Firefox, Opera's Speed Dial and synchronization features help set it apart. In fact, the president of Futuremark, Oliver Baltuch, admits that while Opera isn't the fastest browser, he finds it the most pleasant to use for his personal use.

With Opera's first two betas of its upcoming 10.0 browser, it came a long ways to closing the speed gap between it and Chrome/Safari. In the popular SunSpider benchmark, though, the third Opera beta still lags behind Firefox 3.5. Nonetheless, the third beta does offer noticeable speed increases, as well as new customizations.

The exciting thumbnail preview feature, similar to Aero Peek in Windows 7 and a canceled feature of Firefox 3.5, is now customizable and can appear to the right or left and on the top or bottom of the screen. The browser's crash logger has been improved, as has the turbo mode, a feature which uses Opera's servers to compress data for faster browsing.

The new beta also features improved language support -- 38 languages are now supported. Other popular features present in the other betas return, including inline spell checking, an integrated email client, and a web feed reader. The browser also scores a perfect 100 on the challenging Acid3 test, thanks to its strong standards support.

Still, the browser does have its rough edges. Security is rather poor, though much of Microsoft's protections (such as anti-phishing, and detecting malicious URLs) typically are not needed by more web savvy users (though you can't always count on your friends, family, or a significant other being as knowledgeable).

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