14 DAY TRIAL // Just a day after introducing the Release Candidate Build 3422 of Opera 10.60 Beta, Opera Software made available the fully-fledged Beta development milestone, which features the same Build number as the RC. Opera 10.60 Beta 1 brings to the table a revamped graphical user interface, additional horsepower and HTML5 enhancements. Opera Software Chief Development Officer, Christen Krogh applauded the speed boost delivered by the next iteration of Opera, underlining that people running Opera 10.60 will be among the fastest Internet users on the planet. Opera 10.60 Beta releases are synchronized and available simultaneously for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Opera Software is boasting speed improvements of 50% in Opera 10.60 over Opera 10.50 in select JavaScript tests. The browser’s evolved JS engine and added horsepower are making Opera 10.60 the fastest browser on the planet, the Norway-based browser maker claims. “The JavaScript engine introduced in Opera 10.50 is being fine tuned, giving more than a 75% speed improvement in some benchmark tests,” the company stated.
Opera 10.60 has also suffered a minor UI redesign. Improvements include the introduction of custom thumbnails for tabs. Opera Software has labored to deliver a more intuitive interface, and dropped the tab thumbnails swapping them with icons. Additional enhancements designed to boost navigation speed for end users involve optimizations to the Speed Dial, tab previews and the Opera menu button. In addition, Opera Software also turned off by default the Windows 7 Aero Taskbar Thumbnail Previews, indicating that it received negative feedback from users.
The successor of Opera 10.50 features Geolocation, making the browser location aware. Of course, Opera 10.60 will only share the users’ location with websites if they choose to do so. Additional enhancements to the Speed Dial and search box will also make it simpler for customers to find what they’re looking for with new suggestions provided by the browsers on websites like Wikipedia.
Opera Software has also worked to kick up a notch HTML5 in Opera 10.60. HTML5 Appcache is a new feature tailored to scenarios in which users are running Cloud-based HTML5 applications. Appcache will streamline the usage of HTML5 apps in the browser, even offering offline support. HTML5 Web Workers is designed to allow developers to perform heavy calculations while not impacting the actual performance of the browser.
Another step forward for Opera 10.60 in terms of HTML5 involves support for WebM, and especially the VP8 codec. Opera is, in this regard, joining Google and Mozilla that have already integrated HTML5 WebM VP8 support into the pre-release Builds of the next versions of their respective browsers, Chrome 6.0 and Firefox 4.0. Microsoft also announced that it would support WebM and VP8 with Internet Explorer 9, but only through a codec installed in Windows.
Opera 10.60 Beta 1 is available for download here.
The Mozilla Developer Preview 3.7 Alpha 5 (nightly) is available for download here.
Google Chrome 6.0.427.0 WebM/VP8 Dev is available for download here.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview 2 Build 1.9.7766.6000 is available for download here.
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