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REVIEW: Opera 10 Continues to Innovate, But Its Lead over Other Browsers Is Shrinking

Known in the past for introducing innovations that wouldn’t appear in rivals for years, Opera continues to push browser boundaries–just not as much in Version 10 as in previous versions. That said, Opera 10 boosts performance on flaky connections, and offers interface and mail client improvements.

Usually when a product has single-digit market share (and a low single digit at that), it isn’t considered to be very influential or even relevant. A notable exception is the Opera Web browser: Despite minimal market share (at least on the desktop browser side), Opera has been highly influential, often introducing innovative new browser features years before other browsers.

However, as the browser wars have heated up in the last year or so, Opera’s lead over browsers such as Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox isn’t as big as it used to be. And, in some cases, Opera’s rivals are introducing features Opera doesn’t yet have.

Still, Version 10 of the Opera browser shows that Opera Software still has a few new tricks up its sleeve. Opera 10 isn’t the most innovative version of Opera that I’ve tested, but it includes capabilities and features that I expect to see in other browsers in the not-too-distant future.

Probably the most prominent new feature in Opera is the Turbo mode. When running in Turbo mode, Opera uses compression technology to attempt to speed up slow Internet connections. The main target for Turbo is users still stuck on dial-up connections, but the feature also can be useful for bad Wi-Fi connections and other flaky network situations.

Using both the release and beta versions of Opera 10, I’ve tested the Turbo mode under a variety of situations, including a dial-up connection, weak Wi-Fi connections and even a shared 3G Wi-Fi connection on the Bolt Bus from Boston to New York. All in all, I’ve been fairly impressed. Though Turbo mode didn’t actually speed up slow connections, it did make most Web pages load faster than in other Web browsers under similar test conditions. I also liked that Turbo mode could be configured to kick in only when a connection started to slow down.

Overall, Opera 10 has adopted a bit of a new look and feel (which, to a certain degree, mimics the “chrome” style popular in many browsers today). Most welcome are the new features in Opera’s tabbed browsing interface. Using Opera 10, I could choose to resize the standard tabbed bar in my browser and have it display thumbnails of the sites within the tabs. I found the thumbnail tabs to be very useful for scanning through the many sites I had opened, especially when multiple pages from the same site were open.

Opera was one of the first browsers to introduce the Speed Dial feature, which shows a thumbnail listing of sites when a new tab is opened (a feature that most other browsers have by now copied). In Opera 10, Speed Dial offers some welcome new capabilities, including increased customization options that let users control the layout (showing more or fewer thumbnails) and even add a custom background image to the Speed Dial page.

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