Opera has been available for years as an alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s second-ranking Firefox, Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome. It now ranks No. 5 after being pushed down by the introduction of Chrome.
With its latest version, Opera has an improved Speed Dial, which offers improved thumbnails when a surfer opens a new browser tab. This version, however, is more configurable and displays four to 24 favorites sites at a time as thumbnails.
It also has improved tab handling, allowing a configured browser so that thumbnails of all of your tabs appear above each tab. The thumbnails are resizable as well.
There also other new features, including a spellchecker and built-in email client, and the compression-driven Turbo mode.
Opera claims the browser is more than 40 percent faster than Opera 9.6.
But the big drawback with Opera — unlike IE, Firefox and Chrome — is that it doesn’t allow a privacy mode, which is a big deal for porn surfers because it erases any trace of a session after you close the browser.
Opera's browser download will be available here on Tuesday.