Opera 10.5 now Official [Download]

Opera 10.1 came with bunch of new stuff that no other browser has ever seen. Here comes the next version from the company that “thinks Different” over the competitors.

Previously we talked about leaked build and now Opera 10.5 Official Alpha release is out.

UPDATE: Opera 10.5 Stable for Windows is out with lots of bug fixes and performance boost. Opera 10.5 for  Mac OS, Linux are still in beta, yet powerful. Checkout How and Why Opera 10.5 is Fastest Browser on Earth

What’s New?

1. It’s Faster: The Speed difference can be felt easily. In benchmarks, it’s alot faster than Firefox and matches that of Chrome. Javascript-heavy pages are still not-as-fast as Chrome.

The faster rendering  secret is the newer rendering engine (Presto 2.5.18). Long anticipated Carakan is here to do it’s fast Javascript execution. As Opera writes:

It’s fast, more than 7x faster in SunSpider than Opera 10.10 with Futhark on Windows (Mac optimization is not as far along). You can read more gritty details regarding register-based bytecode, automatic object classification and native code generation in the Opera Core blog.

Browser Performance Benchmark Opera 10, Chrome 4 Chrome 3, Firefox 3.6

Inbuilt page search, web search, URL bar, tab stacking sidebar,  have been modified for easier and snappier navigation.

3. Full Windows 7 Integration
Opera 10.5 takes full advantage of Windows 7’s Superbar. By default, the jump list displays your Speed Dial pages. What’s more is that you can pin pages as well, though right now it only works with Speed Dial items — so pinning isn’t all that useful just yet.

Per-tab thumbnails, on the other hand, work beautifully.

4. HTML5: After Firefox and Chrome, Opera 10.5 finally supports HTML5 natively. It uses an updated rendering engine known as Presto. Presto 2.5 brings new HTML5 features including support for CSS3 Transitions.

5. Per-tab private browsing: It’s pretty similar to what we’ve seen with other browsers: browsing and download history are not saved. Everything which happened in the tab is forgotten about as soon as you close it. One big plus is that you don’t need to open an additional window, making Opera’s implementation just a little bit more inconspicuous.

6. Vega Graphics: Opera’s SVG library now becomes throttled engine for Opera’s  graphics throughout. This would bring Graphics acceleration based on GPU like IE9 (Internet explorer 9), in future.