A recent announcement of the Opera Desktop Team about the forthcoming public release of Opera 10.50 Alpha made Opera fans cry out of joy. The developers remained mysterious and simply hinted that the new release would be about speed which most Opera users attributed with the inclusion of Opera’s new JavaScript engine Caracan which is said to boost the web browser’s JavaScript performance closer to that of the other web browsers.
A pre-alpha of Opera 10.50 leaked a short time ago and is now available publicly. It was linked in various comments and forum threads over at the Opera website like this one.
Everyone thinking about downloading this pre-alpha version of Opera 10.50 should note that this is a pre-alpha version. It is not intended for public release and installation in a productive environment. Users who want to install that version anyway should install it into a separate directory and not in their default Opera directory (if the web browser is installed on the system).
The pre-alpha version does not ship with Caracan. It does however offer other improvements including the layout engine Presto 2.5.18 (Opera 10.10 shipped with Presto 2.2.15). But that’s not the only change in this new version.
Opera has added Windows 7 support to the pre-alpha version which now supports thumbnail previews, Aero effects and jumplists (which display the speed dial pages).
Opera 10.50 introduces several layout changes as well. The menu is now a small icon in the upper left corner of the screen, the file menu header seems to be a thing of the past. This reduces Opera’s header area leaving additional room for the websites that are displayed in the web browser. It is still possible to display the menu bar which is an option in the new menu.
Another new features is the option to open tabs in privacy mode which Opera calls private tabs. Those tabs will open in the same browser window. They are displayed in a light green color to visually distinguish them from the other tabs.
Opera will automatically forget everything that the user did when the tab is closed. This is a tad more comfortable than the solutions provided by Google Chrome and Firefox which open the private browsing mode in a new browser window.
Opera plans to release a pre-alpha of Opera 10.50 on December 22. It is not clear if this will be the same version or a newer build. Many Opera users are still hoping to see the new JavaScript engine in action but it is unlikely that the developers will have added it to that release.
Opera users who would like to test the leaked pre-alpha release might want to consider waiting the two additional days to download the official pre-alpha instead.
The new version does introduce several other exciting new features like the excellent private browsing implementation, Windows 7 support or the new layout engine. (via Download Squad)
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Minimizing menu to icon is available in current stable version as well (looks bit different, but same thing).
It is nice to see that it might become default. There are many ways to do things in Opera’s interface and as for me menu is one of slowest and least used.
Its much faster than 10.1 (not in Javascript yet though ). I remember the opera:config page running slowly and sluggishly in all previous versions. Now its instant. Html rendering seems to be way improved. Can anybody confirm whether hardware acceleration has been turned on or not? It is there in both presto 2.4 and 2.5 but disabled when last heard.
Some Twitter comments do indeed suggest that Carakan WILL be part of the build…
Opera Software has stated (http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2009/12/17/christmas-comes-early-for-opera-users) that the leaked build is pretty old, and says “Don’t run it, the official build on Tuesday is much better and you don’t risk getting nasty trojans on you [sic] pc.”
Download here: http://hotfile.com/dl/21281063/7c207f7/Opera_1050_20192_in.msi.html
How do you use Private Browsing mode?
File > New Private Tab or … New Private Window. If your menu bar’s off, it’s just the Opera button > New Private Tab
Some other cool stuff:
The new . find
The ability to delete things from the history dropdown in the addressbar