Opera 10 review
The final version of Opera 10 has arrived. Can its unique features help it compete in an increasingly crowded browser market?
Opera brings itself up to date with the rest of the pack with a solid browser release offering a good mix of unique features and reasonable performance. However, its main appeal is likely to be to advanced users who have the desire for more technical detail and access to that left-of-field feature set. For everyone else, the more mainstream browsers will do fine.
Nor indeed do the new features in version 10 reach out to that constituency. Faster browsing might have been considered a godsend back in the dial-up days, but now it's primarily a geeky concern. And tab previews are primarily useful for power users who habitually work with dozens of tabs, rather than casual surfers who may only use a handful.
Opera 10 could be a good choice for a netbook: its low RAM footprint of 45MB when browsing a single tab makes it well suited to a low-memory machine, and there's a button in the main interface to reflow a web page to fit the window size handy for small screens.
Mostly, though, Opera 10 builds on the existing formula without changing the fundamentals. That means it's destined to be hailed as a step forward by existing Opera users... and, once again, passed over by everybody else.
Verdict
Opera brings itself up to date with the rest of the pack with a solid browser release offering a good mix of unique features and reasonable performance. However, its main appeal is likely to be to advanced users who have the desire for more technical detail and access to that left-of-field feature set. For everyone else, the more mainstream browsers will do fine.
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