Opera 10.50, possibly the best version of Opera so far, has just been released for download.
For those following the progress of the browser through itspre-alpha, alpha and betastages, the browser doesn’t bring anything much new to the table since the last release. Since the first preview release, the browser has been getting increasingly stable and with the final release, what you have is the fastest and one of the most stable browsers available today.
Continuing its positive trend, Opera 10.50 beats the latest Chrome 5 dev and Firefox 3.7a3 nightlies in performance thanks to its new Carakan JavaScript engine, and Vaga graphics library.
Besides that it includes the Opera Unite, Opera Link, and Opera Turbo technologies. Opera Unite allows one to easily share their files, and serve content from their browser without needing to know how to set up a server or messing with the firewall. Opera Link is Opera’s synchronization service to keep your bookmarks shared across computers and devices. While Opera Link has been available since Opera 9.50, Opera Unite was just introduced in the recent Opera 10.10 version, both require an Opera account to work. Opera Turbo, available since Opera 10, is a server-side compression technology, with with page load times can be drastically reduced by compressing the web content before it is downloaded to your computer, at the loss of a little image quality.
Opera Software previewed a new widget technology in a beta version of Opera 10.20 with which widgets created for Opera (which uses the W3C recommended widget specification), could run independent of the browser as long as it was installed. This is quite similar to the concept of Adobe AIR, although web widgets are less powerful.
Opera 10.50 also features a revamped UI which makes full use of Aero effects available in Windows Vista and 7. It also supports Windows 7 jumplists, and tab previews.
The browser also features one of the best implementations of privacy mode in the browser. unlike the private browsing modes in Firefox and Chrome, Opera allows for private mode browsing on a per-tab basis.
Opera 10.50 is right now only available for Windows, and the Linux and Mac OSX versions are still in the beta stage.
Download Opera 10.50 from theOpera website