Opera 10.60 Released For Linux – Was it worth the wait?

The first stable release of an Opera browser since November 2009 has finally been announced today.

The last stable release of an Opera browser on Linux was the 10.10 branch back in November last year making today’s release of Opera 10.60 an important upgrade for users. A whole host of new features and improvements have occurred since then including: –

• Native integration with GNOME & KDE (no longer uses QT)
• Geolocation support
• Private mode
• WebM support
• Visual tabs
• Chrome-style search-as-you-type in the URL bar
• Configurable speed-dial
• Over 60% faster than 10.10 thanks to new Carakan JavaScript engine
• Bing now default search engine
• Opera unite fixes

Was it worth the wait?

I think we all know the answer to that one: Yes. Opera feels much more at home in GNOME now than it ever did previously thanks to the exit of Qt and reliance instead on X to draw the interface.

Opera has often has issues with fonts on Linux but, dare i say, fonts appear smoother in Opera 10.60 than they do in Google Chrome! 
Speed

Benchmark tests, whilst interesting, aren’t always entirely representative of real-life results. A browser my execute some java 2milliseconds quicker but is that a reason to continually hop between browser based solely on results? No.

Opera 10.60, without a doubt, has some of the best benchmark scores for a browser on Linux but unless your life depends on seeing a webpage a fraction of a second quicker the browser needs to offer a lot more than simply raw stamina.

Speed increases of over 60% are touted when comparing 10.60 to 10.10 – and a lot of this has to do with the new Carakan JavaScript engine. It is a bit of a beast. That said the speed increase doesn’t feel notably different from that of Chrome/ium or Midori or even the latest Firefox.

So what else does Opera 10.60 have to offer? Great support for web-standards like WebWorker, Apache & HTML5 and the browser can boast lighter resource usage than other browsers (although it is not the lightest).

Download

Opera 10.60 for Linux can be downloaded via the following link. Ubuntu users note that .debs are provided for both 32bit, 64bit and PPC.

http://www.opera.com/download/

Don’t forget…

To grab one of Kyle Baker’s excellent Ambiance/Radiance Opera 10.60 skins to truly integrate Opera into your Ubuntu desktop!

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/06/opera-106-ambiance-radiance-skins.html