Opera 10 Alpha 1 now available

Opera has long been the pioneer of the browser world; many of the features that we take for granted in Firefox, IE and Safari actually began life in Opera. The browser also tends to have the best web standards support around, and the latest alpha preview of Opera 10 is no exception. Although the new Opera 10 is an alpha preview, and not recommended for anything more than testing, its noteworthy for being the first release to grab a perfect score on the ACID 3 browser stress test. The ACID tests are designed to push a browser’s limits when it comes to rendering web pages. The idea is that if browsers can render the ACID test pages, then they should be able to handle just about anything on the web.

Although the ACID 3 test has been around for some time, Opera 10 is the first release to pass it. Apple’s Safari browser, which was the first to pass the ACID 2 test, also passes ACID 3, but only using the developer nightly builds. Of course cutting edge web standards support isn’t the only thing coming in Opera 10. The first alpha also packs in revamped and much faster rendering engine, on-the-fly spell checking for text fields, support for HTML messages in Opera Mail, and an auto-update feature to force browser updates. We don’t recommend rushing out and downloading Opera 10 in its current alpha state, but the preview release is good news for Opera fans. So far Opera has not announced a time line for the final release of Opera 10.

Source: Wired