Opera 10 beta 3 speeds up, drops Unite, tweaks interface: ”
Late last night Opera pushed out the third beta of the upcoming v10. There are plenty of feature updates and changes in this version, including a reported 40% speed boost to the Presto engine, improved Turbo compression, and a number of interface tweaks.
Visual tab previews can now be displayed on the left or right – in previous versions, thumbnails only appeared if your tab bar was placed on the top or bottom. There’s also an auto-updater built in and a better inline spell checker, thanks to the open source Hunspell project.
Gone from beta 3 is Opera’s server-in-browser project Unite. Because it is still in the alpha stage of development the decision was made to deliver Unite as a separate download.
Beta 3 definitely feels faster than previous versions, though it still came up short in benchmarks like Dromaeo and Peacekeeper. With my usual set of half a dozen ‘core’ web apps open, Opera initially used about 40mb memory less than Firefox 3.5. However, as I kept my session open usage continued to climb, ultimately peaking around 230mb (about the same as Google Chrome 3 on the same system).