Opera

Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha was promising and as expected the final version of Opera 10.5 Final is a pleasure to use, Opera 10.5 features the brand new Carakan JavaScript rendering engine which is said to be 7x faster than its predecessor, coupled with a brand-new interface design and support for latest web-technologies this browser is surely going to be hit.

Opera is claiming their latest Windows browser release as worlds fastest web-browser, but in our benchmark tests using PeaceKeeper this claim does not seem to be valid as shown in the results below.

Opera has always been the leader in innovating web-browser technologies and once again the Opera team has came-up with some promising stuff with public release of Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha, the major new features worth mentioning here would be the all new JavaScript rendering engine Carakan which is touted to be 7x faster in benchmarks then it's predecessor Futhark used in current stable release of Opera 10.10, new Presto 2.5 engine with support for CSS3 transitions and transforms with more HTML5 features, new hardware accelerated VEGA graphics library and support for private tab (no need to open a window) apart from the new address-bar and other GUI enhancements.

Opera features an excellent password manager - Opera Wand, but provides no means to see saved password in Wand, I found myself into similar trouble and had to use a simple trick to recover saved password in Opera, we will be using the old school javascript trick to reveal hidden passwords in Opera.

One the most useful feature of Opera is Speed Dial, in earlier versions of Opera it was not possible to add additional speed dial slots but with the latest version this is achievable using a simple hack, just follow the instructions below to implement the hack.

The DragonFly teaser page at Opera's website has started a wave of speculations in the blogger community about what exactly it is, bloggers have started posting about the teaser providing good publicity for the upcoming product, all kind of rumors have started, some predicting it as a set of developmental tools and some as "Opera 10", however blog post from David, Chief Web Opener at Opera stating DragonFly as "It won’t directly affect everybody, but will hopefully become invaluable for those that it does." do hint towards a set of development tools aimed at web-developer community. What exactly it is can only be said when Opera officially announces it at upcoming SxSW in Austin Texas.

With all the development going around in web-browser arena, the "Which is the best web-browser?" battle is sure to heat up in coming days.