back to article Opera stretches vocal cords with v.10 release

Opera 10 is now available to download for Windows, Linux and Mac platforms, less than a week after Opera Software spun out the release candidate version of the browser. The Oslo, Norway-based company said the browser comes loaded with Opera Turbo, a compression engine intended to speed up slow web connections. It claimed the …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    New javascript engine

    They've said from the start that the new Javascript engine wouldn't be in Opera 10 but in the next major version. That said, they said the JS engine in Opera 10 has been modified a lot.

    I don't know about Unite. Given the fanfare they launched it with, I thought it would come with Opera 10, but did they ever say when they were anticipating its release?

    Also, the ability to spell-check normal text fields as well as textareas is not new. It's the fact that Opera 10 now uses an inline spell checker that's new (and, as I understand, incompatible with the old one, so I'm not sure what happens to all your old custom words added over previous versions when you install Opera 10).

  2. spencer
    Heart

    Gmail.

    I tried out the RC version not too long ago, on recomendation from someone commenting on an Opera related story. Only to find that it couldn't display gmail properly (this was on a PPC Mac). I hope it's been fixed with the final build since this is kind of a deal breaker for me.

  3. Defiant
    Thumb Down

    No boddies

    Stopped using Opera after getting tired of hearing them complain about Microsoft. If they had a decent browser they wouldn't need to complain

  4. CaptainBlue
    FAIL

    Download Fail

    Oh dear! Looks as though Opera won't be coming to a laptop near me - 404s and server timeouts aplenty.

  5. Charlie Clark Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    Unite - better when it's ready

    Given how little testing Unite has had, as it was only included in the alpha's a couple of months ago and had a few changes since then, it makes sense to add it "when it's ready" and it's in the Opera 10.10 betas.

    For most people Opera Turbo is probably of more immediate use if you're on a slow connection. It's a USP that's not easily copied by the Firefuckers.

  6. Pete 2 Silver badge

    but the best reason to use it

    .. is that flash works.

    On Ubuntu / AMD64 Firefox has always been "troubled" with flash - it usually manages to stagger out a few plays of selected flash sites before locking up, grabbing 100% of the CPU, going for a lie down or otherwise crapping out. Sometimes it can be revived with a large mug of cocoa and a severe killing off of the npviewer.bin process. However, most times it's a goner.

    Opera 10b3 (which my installation *still* says is the latest) however, just plays 'em - again and again: Sam[1].

    Now, some say that flash is the spawn of the devil - who am I to disagree. But it does form an increasing amount of content (and advertisements, you can't have everything for free) and therefore can't be ignored. This alone makes Opera my browser of choice[1].

    [1] Yes, I know. He never actually said that.

    [2] This message, posted with Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092510 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.0.3 - figure that one out.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Meh

    If its anything like Opera 9.5 it's more unstable that the Beta's, introduced new bugs in the RC that will never be fixed and won't be usable until 10.1

  8. Da Weezil
    Thumb Up

    Seems improved....

    First impressions are that it runs better than the beta which used to take a tea break loading some sites.

    Be interesting to see how it pans out in general use. Might even give the unite toy a run and see if its useful - even if only for grabbing stuff from my pc when I'm away from home.

    Now i gotta boot to Suse and see what's on offer for my favoured o/s... after I update the dictionary to "proper" English rather than "septic speak"

  9. Ray0x6
    Troll

    Minority report!

    As in , a report for the minority. Thanks, El Reg!

  10. shaunm

    few things missing....

    I use unite and was interested to see it won't be fully integrated until the next version along with all the other curious tweaks.

    But hey still a million times better IE, but then again what isn't these days.

  11. Jad
    Thumb Down

    Tried it ...

    Loathed it ...

    Went back to Firefox :)

  12. Dave 129

    Just updated

    Just updated as auto-update is not picking up the final release - oh well! Maybe coming later? As far as stability goes, I've been using Opera 10 since the alpha stages and it's been fine; in fact the betas have been great! No complaints at all. Flash occasionally causes some weirdness - but that happens in most browsers anyway.

    Opera website is still pretty borked even now (10am EST); it took quite a while to get to the download page.

    @Jad: Tried Firefox, loathed it, went back to Opera. Now only use Firefox under sufferance / testing ;)

    @AC 11:19: Not wanting to sound like an Opera fanboy but, FF3/3.5 weren't exactly any better. I had no end of stability issues when the first final versions were released.

  13. Matthew 3
    Thumb Up

    Seems to be miles quicker already

    Very glad to have downloaded this one. And on my stuck-out-in-the-sticks location it is finally giving my internet pages a decent lick of speed. El Reg has never loaded more quickly!

    Very impressed!

  14. Robert Ramsay
    Thumb Down

    Gah!

    I love Opera. Have used it since 3.5 and was even one of the people who paid for it at one point. However, I downloaded and upgraded Opera 10, and running it gave the error "Error initializing Opera: module 9".

    Just as well I tested out on my other machine...

  15. J-Wick
    Thumb Up

    Opera on Linux - one in a million?

    Given Opera's already small market share, what proportion of internet users are access the web via Opera on Linux? :D (Yes, I'm one of them)

    Even managed to get Flash working - can't live without Youtube! And for no other reason than the fact that I obviously like to make things difficult for myself, I'm using AMD64 Ubuntu.

    FF does work with it, but it's a pain to get right.

    Anyway, since I'm happy with my current set up (Opera 9.52), I doubt I'll upgrade.

  16. MarkOne
    FAIL

    re: Hits a few bum notes, but is anyone listening?

    Anyone with any sense or technical savvy will be, as we know Opera is the fastest and most fully featured browser there is. It's not got the security swiss cheese of IE or Firefox, and it's not allround Crap like Safari/Chrome.

  17. luxor
    Thumb Up

    Sweet.

    Great stuff.

    A happy Opera user.

  18. Richard 45
    Unhappy

    ICM

    Still no colour management (promised in O 9.5), so I'll be staying with FF.

  19. OneTwoThreeFour
    Thumb Up

    Opera all the way

    I used to use Firefox until I realised it was getting progressively worse with each new version: more bloated and useless features cluttering the interface and making it harder to use. After upgrading to Firefox 3.5, I hated basically every new thing in it (and there's not much new) and in addition it completely killed my computer - everything ran unbelievably slowly when Firefox was open.

    A clean install with Windows 7 (final) gave the opportunity to use IE8 which, for some reason under Vista and Windows 7 only loads web pages about 30% of the time. A removal of IE8 from all the defaults later, and not wanting to even try and installed the evil Firefox 3.5, Opera seemed the next choice.

    Opera is everything Firefox should be. Despite the amount of features, the browser is small and compact and has maintained a simple and easy interface. Webpages download reasonably quickly, and generally I do like the feel of the browser. A little problem with Java (you have to copy the DLL from the Java directory to System32) but otherwise perfect.

    I highly recommend Opera if you're becoming fed up of Firefox's increasing bloat and instability. It's a really excellent browser and I haven't found anything it can't handle better than Firefox.

  20. Bryce Prewitt
    Flame

    @ MarkOne

    I've been trying to figure something in my head, and maybe you can help me out, yeah? When a person is insane, as you clearly are, do you know that you're insane? Maybe you're just sitting around, reading "The Register", masturbating in your own feces, do you just stop and go, "Wow! It is amazing how fucking crazy I really am!"? Yeah. Do you guys do that?

  21. Lu
    Thumb Up

    @ J-Wick

    Guess you should make that 2 in a million then. Been using Opera on Linux for ages.

    And regarding Flash issues, that's Flash on Linux that's problematic, not Opera itself. But that's been sorted for a while now, anyway.

    Oh, and I've tried FF many many times. Too slow, damn. Infuriatingly so sometimes.

  22. Ceadunas Tiomana
    Stop

    but horses are thpecial you can't eat them :(

    Type your comment here — plain text only, no HTML

  23. Ceadunas Tiomana

    When fat ladies sing

    I've been using Opera since version 4. I find it fast, stable and reliable. It's very rare I find a page that doesn't work in Opera. And, using the right skin (breeze), the borders take up minimal screen space. One app for surfing and email - makes sense to me.

    I also started using FireFox about a year ago. Yeah, it's great for someone like me who's happy to tinker with settings and plug-ins, but for the run-of-the-mill home user who barely understands what a mouse is, there's only Opera.

    Download, Install, Run

    On my dual OS laptop I can even have both Windows and Linux Opera sharing a common set of files, like mail, bookmarks, configs and so on.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Seems quicker

    Used to love FF but noticed it was becoming more bloated with every release. Quite like Opera and this new versions seems to load pages very quickly, in fact the only thing I miss from FF is the noscript and adblock plugins.

  25. Patrick O'Reilly
    Thumb Up

    Another Happy User

    Opera's been my browser of choice for years now and with the standard of the current version it will continue to be for many more.

    Under the hood Opera have been pushing themselves for years but with this release they have a new designer in Jon Hicks (check him out he's responsable for the Miro and Camio logo's also) who has done a lot of work updating the style of Opera.

    The UI has been much improved, and it is now possible to hide the menu bar so that only the tabs and address bar are the only chrome onscreen, maximizing browsing real-estate. The visual tabs are also a cool new feature which I doubt FFF's (FireFox Fanboi's) will be able to copy too quickly. Altogther the new UI is really impressive, far better than the 9.5 skin, and should attract many new users.

    As mentioned above Opera Turbo will also be another USP which at first I questioned but after been caught on overcrowded WiFi one too many times soon grew to love. The image quality does suffer some what but with overall loading times increasing between 3x to 6x thats a small sacrifice. This has been somewhat of a natural progression as Opera Mini does somewhat of a similar job for rendering websites a full size on mobile devices.

    The new spell checking engine mentioned by Bit Fiddler is actually an open-source program called Hunspell, and is the same spell checking engine used by OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Google Chrome and various other applications.

    As an Opera user my main issue isn't with websites that discriminate against Opera and it's users. E.g. Bing, which serves a screen that says the site won't work with your browsers, and sometimes Google's GMail and GDoc's have served similar pages. Sunguard's student offering does something similar, throwing an unknown error when it sees the Opera user agent but working fine when Opera spoof's FF. And the same thing happens with GoDaddy's admin panel, which only works in Opera when spoofing the FF ua.

    I look forward to a day when the web is driven by standards and is truely an open platform where services are served irrespective of what applicaion or device is used to access it. When that day comes I'm sure Opera will be leading the way, until then Opera 10 is a strong browser with a really userful set of features.

    Definitely worth a try.

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Opera Unite to appear in version 10.1

    According to Opera's 'next version' page, Unite will appear in 10.1, though they're calling it 10.10 (ten-ten?)

    http://www.opera.com/browser/next/

  27. Whitter
    Thumb Down

    For my particular web use - borked.

    Alas, v10 has borked my use of vBulletin boards - even turning off all caching, it can't update what is a new post, what has just been read etc.

    So it's back to being a 'fox user after 2 years of opera fandom.

  28. Daly_de_Gagne

    Opera Will Perish on Its Righteousness

    Opera 10 is a great browser, certainly world class, and perhaps the world's best.

    And there's the rub.

    Because this browser may one day perish on its own righteousness - a concern for being pure in the browser world that will deny it 100.000s of users.

    While trying to adhere to the standards Opera has put it beyond properly showing pages that are deficient. Unfortunately not all web sites meet the standards, but those of us in the real world still need to see those pages. Each time we have to go to memory hog Firefox, or one of the other browsers to see such pages, it makes it less convenient to use Opera.

    Opera also, not realizing the surge in cloud oriented applications such as Evernote, or the prevalence of web clippers such as Evernote and that great Aussie contender Surfulater, doesn't let these products be used with Opera. That's ruddy madness.

    Well, there go another 100,000 users at least.

    I use Evernote and Surfulater every day. As a writer, researcher, consultant I maintain a data base of many thousands of web clips. I'd love to do all my clipping in Opera because it is more stable and faster than the memory hog FF and the others. But I can't, because the boffins at Opera figure they can go it alone.

    And lastly, it is the go it alone, my way or the highway approach of their forum strong man Haavard that has turned off many people who aren't as geeky or swift as he and his followers are, or who just don't always agree with his decisions. If the Seinfeld show could have the Soup Nazi in New York, then Haavard is the Forum Nazi in Oslo.

    We need to see a more open and friendly approach on Opera's face, and Opera needs to start making significant market gains or, as I say, one day its righteousness - or is it pride - will lead to a great fall.

    And that'd be a pity.

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