I'm a long time user of Opera.
Always surprised why it is very underrated.
Just for the record :
* Opera is and was the fastest browser on limited memory/cpu machines
* Opera is the most user friendly browser, it has always been so. (tabs, sync, speed dials, quick preferences, full zoom, email client, irc, skins, notes, downloader (btw, opera has the best "builtin" browser downloader ever, you can actually open files while downloading), history search (yes, opera's history search is the best), debugger and countless of small other useful details & features)
This browser is simply a treasure, yes I have tested every other browser and I keep a copy of FF with a bunch of plugins.
Chrome comes very close. Its interface is actually cleaner than Opera's. I used to use Opera, but now I'm using Chrome. This new Opera has a better interface that leaves most screen space for the actual website, much like Chrome. Maybe I'll switch back to Opera.
Exactly! It was so tough for me to change from Opera to chrome. But chrome is much more minimal and the faster load time was enough of a killer feature for me to switch. But this version is pretty impressive.
I did a benchmark with Opera 10.50 alpha Chrome 4 dev and Safari 4. While the numbers not the same, Opera is still faster than Chrome and Safari. I didn't try webkit nightly because chrome dev outforms webkit nightly in my previous tests.
> Opera is and was the fastest browser on limited memory/cpu machines
I used Opera 5 on my 50 MHz 486 when no other browser was truly up to the task. Continued using it on other machines until Safari 2 hit on the Mac.
I've always thought that Opera was by far the best browser out there, but Safari integrates so well with Mac OS X and ends up being quite good with SafariStand and Saft (now using Glims). I might go back to Opera someday though.
>Most interactive dialogs will no longer block tabs or disturb your work flow. Tab specific dialogs (like javascript popups) are displayed as part of the tab in an overlay, so you can easily switch tabs without have to move or close the dialogs.
I really hope this becomes more widespread. I hate greedy focus-grabbing alerts.
The versioning nomenclature seems somewhat chaotic... here it says 10.5 and their current version is 10.10 and on the linked page they refer to 10.1 and also talk about 10.50.
I guess that 10.10 == 10.1 and 10.5 == 10.50 but it is a bit confusing...
Oh, and the download crashes with SIGBUS on my MacPro running 10.6 :(
Actually, the 10.10 is because of the Unite component. When they released the official new version, 10, they didn't have Unite ready yet, it was on another branch, the 10.10 (they reserved a few numbers for hotfixes for the version without Unite).
Phew maybe you're right I admit I just saw a comment on the opera desktop team blog and haven't tested it myself. However browser benchmarks are tricky - people can get quite different results on different machines...
Actually, Opera has already the ad blocker, named "content blocker", for some versions already. Find more details at this address: http://my.opera.com/Tamil/blog/ad-block
Opera has had ad blocking built in since at least 9.x, if not earlier. It does the job for me; I don't find it wanting. You can point and shoot to block anything that happens to get through the default filters, and the filtering takes wildcards by default, even. Meaning clicking an ad will block all ads from the same ___domain or parent path (e.g. adserver.tld/ads/*). Shift click to block just a specific image. The common text ads are also filtered.
so sad that this is the case, but it is :( adblock seems to have a record (for my personal use at least) as almost never having a false positive. privoxy on the other hand seems to block all sorts during actual use that aren't really ads, especially flash.
There's AdSweep at http://adsweep.org/ - I've never managed to get it to work on Opera 10 under Ubuntu, but I find it works well on Chrome and plenty of people have given it good reviews.
Windows 7 user here. It's been a long time since I tried out Opera properly last time, but I have to say this new release is snappy, smooth and very, very clean. And unlike Chrome it actually tries to mimick the native UI conventions without getting boring.
And as other's have mentioned, the Windows 7 add-on features are a nice bonus.
Just for the record : * Opera is and was the fastest browser on limited memory/cpu machines * Opera is the most user friendly browser, it has always been so. (tabs, sync, speed dials, quick preferences, full zoom, email client, irc, skins, notes, downloader (btw, opera has the best "builtin" browser downloader ever, you can actually open files while downloading), history search (yes, opera's history search is the best), debugger and countless of small other useful details & features)
This browser is simply a treasure, yes I have tested every other browser and I keep a copy of FF with a bunch of plugins.