Opera 10 Alpha 1 Build Excite Fans

I recieved an RSS feed from Opera Development Team informing that Alpha 10 of Opera Browser is now available for download on their website.  The new Alpha boasts new features and standards including scoring a perfect score 100/100 at ACID3 test.

Features so far for the Alpha 10 are as follows:

• Presto 2.2 Engine
• Performance boost
• 100/100 and pixel-perfect on the Acid3 test
• Auto-update
• Inline spelling checker
• Opera Mail improvements, including rich text composition and delete after X days
• Widget Improvements on Linux

Presto 2.2 Engine

Speed and innovation is what Opera set it apart from other browser and with the new Presto 2.2 Engine, an updated kernel that powers the browser, Opera’s Development team is confident that rendering speed will further increase by 30% more.

Auto-update

The long awaited auto-update functionality is here! That’s right, Opera will now update itself as new versions are released. And for those of you who want every single snapshot release just enable the “Download All Snapshots” setting (opera:config#AutoUpdate). Please be aware that if you do so, you will be upgrading to all snapshots – and as you know: snapshots contain the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes and data loss situations. In fact, they may not work at all. You have been warned 🙂

Inline Spelling Checker

Opera now checks your spelling as you write! The inline spelling checker is enabled by default for multi-line edit fields and this Alpha comes with a US English dictionary. Use the context menu of input fields to change the settings, and to correct spelling errors. See the detailed changelog for information about using other dictionaries.

Opera Mail Improvements

Rich Text Composition
Opera Mail can now send rich text messages! You can insert inlined images, styled text, links, custom HTML, and more! You can also forward and redirect rich text messages or reply to them with styled text.
In the account settings select “Prefer HTML formatting” in the outgoing tab so that you can start writing rich text mails by default in our WYSIWYG editor!

Remove from server after X days (POP-only)
This new feature is for our POP users with limited server space. Opera Mail can now remove messages from the server that have been there for X days. Of course you can limit Opera Mail to only remove read messages from the server, and/or only fully downloaded messages, which works great in combination with low-bandwith mode.

Other Changes
When viewing a message, the message subjects are now a text field again instead of a button. We have added also a “Thread” button to the message list toolbar to make some features more visible.

Widget Improvements on Linux/UNIX

We have added experimental support for true transparency for widgets on Linux/UNIX. For this to work you have to have an X Server that provides a 32-bit visual device and a running composite manager. If you start Opera from a terminal it will print this message if it detects a suitable 32-bit visual device: “(experimental) ARGB visual detected: Use ‘-visual 0x6f’ to activate it”.

If you have a composite manager running you can then try it out by starting Opera with: “opera -visual 0x6f” (0x6f may be another number on your machine).

Opera Browser 10, codenamed Peregrine, will compete against rivals from Microsoft, Mozilla and Google all whom as well boasting the arrival of their updated browsers.

You may get your  copy of Opera 10 Alpha at the following links:

Windows
Windows Classic
Macintosh
Macintosh (Intel-only)
UNIX

Remember though that this is currently in Alpha stage, not even a beta, therefore bugs and possible security issues may arise.  Please use this browser at your own risk.  Instead, you may download the stable version Opera Browser 9.62 at http://www.opera.com/download