Opera announced Thursday the availability of the first alpha release of Opera 10, the next major version of the company's web browser. The new version, which is built on Opera's Presto 2.2 rendering engine, includes some significant improvements to rendering and standards compliance.
This release expands Opera's native support for CSS3 and HTML5. One particularly nice feature that has been introduced in this release is support for RGBA colors in CSS, which makes it possible to describe colors with a translucent alpha channel. This feature, which is already supported in Safari and Firefox 3, facilitates some nice styling effects. Unlike the CSS opacity property, which is applied on top of content areas as a filter, the RGBA color feature is a lot more flexible and can be used, for example, to do transparent backgrounds.
Another really exciting feature that has arrived in this version of Opera is support for web fonts, a CSS3 feature that enables web sites to load fonts from a path or URL. It allows web designers to use whatever fonts they want instead of being forced to rely on the fonts that are already available to users. Safari was one of the first to introduce support for this feature last year, and Firefox will be adding it in version 3.1. Opera will support several font formats, including TTF, OTF, and SVG.
The Presto JavaScript engine got some improvements too, with a new faster RegExp implementation and support for the W3C selectors API, which provides a concise CSS-like syntax for selecting page elements in JavaScript.
A hit of Acid3
Opera's improved standards support has given the browser a big boost on Acid3, a test devised by Ian Hickson that evaluates the renderer's compatibility with various advanced web standards. The Opera and WebKit developers have been racing to completely implement support for all the standards required to pass the test. They both announced support for completing the test with 100/100 at roughly the same time earlier this year. Opera has previously released a highly experimental technical preview of the renderer in order to publicly demonstrate its completion of the test. Opera 10 alpha 1 is the first actual Opera release that includes this functionality in the browser itself.
In addition to significant improvements to the underlying rendering engine, Opera 10 alpha 1 also adds a few new features that improve the quality of the user experience. One long-overdue improvement is support for automatic updates. The browser will now notify the user when new versions are available and can automatically install the latest version. Another nice improvement in the browser is support for inline spell-checking.
This is a good release with a lot of important enhancements under the hood. It will help Opera keep up with Safari and Firefox while also delivering rock-solid standards compliance to its end users. The software is available for download from the Opera snapshots web site. For more information, check out the official changelog.
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