Each time Norway-based Web browser Opera releases a new version, the company boasts about how much faster this version is than the last – and this time is no exception.
Opera 10.60 beta claims to be 50% faster than its predecessor and will support a number of cutting edge Web technologies that could help bring it further into the mainstream.
Part of Opera’s claim to fame is its Opera Turbo technology, which is a web caching and compression service that compresses Web traffic by up to 80%, meaning Web pages can download faster. According to Opera, this means 65% faster browsing on Edge mobile networks and 50% faster browsing on 3G, and we can’t help but wonder if Opera might see an uptick in traffic when the iPhone finally gets tethering in the U.S. later this month.
Beyond speed, this newest version of Opera will also begin supporting the W3C Geolocation API, the WebM open video format for HTML5 video, and HTML5 Appcache and Web Workers technologies.
The Geolocation API support will allow web application to requestion geolocation data from Opera, meaning that when you use a service like Google it can cater search results to your location or Twitter can identify where you’re tweeting from using its new “Places” feature.
The WebM royalty-free video format, now supported by this latest version, was just released by Google at its 2010 I/O developer conference and aims to be a cross-browser and cross-platform solution to offering video online.
Beyond all of these technical improvements, Opera has a few usability updates as well, including search suggestions in the browser bar, custom thumbnails for tabs and other general graphic improvements. As ReadWriteWeb’s Frederic Lardinois said in his review of Opera 10.50, Opera’s growing feature set continues to best every other browser on the market, but its lack of a plugin ecosystem could continue to hold it back. If it keeps on supporting leading-edge technology, such as HTML5 and WebM, it could gain traction.
This latest beta version is available for download for both Mac and Windows.
