The Opera development team have given all Linux users something to smile about this fresh new years day – the Pre-Alpha of Opera 10.5!
“Blazingly fast”
First impressions are pretty good because boy does this browser have speed on its side thanks to the new Carakan JavaScript engine powering it. A quick non-scientific side-by-side comparison of Amazon.co.uk loading in both Google Chrome and Opera 10.5 had Opera winning hands down.
It is blazingly fast!
Interface – Bye bye blocky menus!
As we mentioned in our previous article on Opera 10.5, the browser no-longer uses or relies on the Qt framework.
This is noticeable from the get-go on a GNOME desktop because it boots up with relative speed now it doesn’t need to call and employ an entire Qt library. UI wise it looks pretty good on my GNOME desktop given it’s just had Qt ripped from it’s skeleton.
There are one or two issues such as fonts look blurry and baldy rendered and menu’s disappear when using them, but overall it integrates quite nicely with GTK – and this integration will only get better during the development cycle.
Sadly for KDE users, this pre-alpha only currently “draws” GTK for its interface, so you’ll be stuck with something resembling Opera via MSDoS via an etch-a-sketc. (It’s not that bad, honestly!)
HTML5 Video
Opera 10.5 also includes support for the HTML5 video tag – which Opera themselves first proposed. The “video” tag on Opera lets videos use the native GStreamer plug-in set, so anything GStreamer can handle – so can Opera!
Sandwiching Gstreamer between the video itself and what you see also has an added benefit to end users – “improved responsiveness and audio quality.”
Opera:Cache – A new way to view
Also present is Opera’s spiffing new cache view – allowing you to browse, search and preview items on a “Per Site” basis.
Missing
Given the status of this release being not-even-an-alpha, please don’t expect this to be stable, feature complete or even pretty to look at. The standalone Opera Desktop Widgets we told you about a week or so ago, which are currently available with Opera 10.2, are missing from here (i.e. widgets close when Opera closes.)
Download
Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha (boy am i sick of typing that out…) can be “got” @ http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/labs-6177/
Install
To run Opera, extract the archive and run ‘./opera’ from the main directory via terminal or just double click on the ‘opera’ file inside.