Opera 10 Beta 1

Dang, it's fast.
I will be reviewing this upgrade after about a week or two. Ongoing notes after the jump.


Design

• New UI Skin, being worked on by the venerable Jon Hicks, better known as the designer of the Firefox/Thunderbird brand.
• The standard skin is pleasant, and not garish. There is a bit of a Leopard vs. Vista feel when comparing the two.
• In return for all the functionality cues Chrome takes from Opera, 10.0 buttons resemble Chrome's.
• Mild design oversights that should be ironed out in the weeks to come. The address bar has a Jay Leno (2-3 extra pixels along the bottom edge, forming a "chin")
• Visual Tabs: pull down the Tab Bar expander to show live previews of open tabs. Can also be activated by double-clicking the pull tab (which I prefer), or turn it off entirely. OMNIWeb and Windows 7 inspired?
• There seems to be a pixel shaved off the right edge of my scroll bars
• An updated snapshot build of the Beta rectifies many of the issues above. They've been stricken from the list.

Function

• Hot diggity it is fast compared to 9.64. I don't care much for benchmarks, but something under the hood is whipping through page rendering.
• Benchmarks show beta 10.0 is slower than Chrome 2.0 and Firefox 3.5 beta 4 in synthetic tests. Chrome, Firefox and Safari are definitely the front-runners in terms of rendering/scripting speed. Browsing speed, however, is more than just benchmark performance. Good to see so much competition though!
• Configurable Speed Dial: up to 25 Speed Dials available now, going from 2x2 to 5x5 configurations, with wide-screen options (4x3, 5x4). Choose your own background.
• The one function I missed the most when I switched from Firefox to Opera back in 2007, was in-line spell-checking. Opera 10 has finally added it to its extensive repertoire.
• Opera Unite beta is rolled into the latest snapshot build of the Beta. It allows for some direct P2P sharing, and treating your computer like a file share with select people, with zero configuration. Accessible through browsers other than Opera. More info.