Lord of the Web

Opera has made available the first alpha release of Opera 10, the next major version of its standards compliant but not so popular web browser.

The highlight of the new release seems to be the new rendering engine - Presto 2.2, which is believed to provide “improvements in speed, performance and security”. The Presto JavaScript engine got some tweaks as well, with a better implementation of RegExp and support for the W3C selectors API.

In addition to the great improvements in the rendering engine, Opera 10 alpha 1 has some, perhaps long overdue, neat additions. Opera 10 alpha adds the support for automatic updates. The browser will now notify the user when new versions are available and can automatically install the latest version. Another additions is inline spell-checking, which was added in IE8 beta as well ( Firefox had it for ages, it seems!).Opera has also made improvements to Opera Mail, providing support fot HTML formatting.

Opera 10 alpha brings in some goodies for the developers too. It brings in opacity through RGBA and HSLA, facilitating some nice styling effects. It also brings in Web Fonts -including SVG font files- basically, it enables web sites to load fonts from a path or URL. It is to be noted that this feature will be coming to Firefox 3.1.

Maybe the big daddy of all, Opera 10 alpha has got an Acid3 100/100 score, which goes to show Opera’s improved standards support. Despite being a great improvement to an already cool browser, it remains to be seen if Opera 10 will change the fortunes of Opera and improve its browser share.