With the bad news that Opera Mobile for Android might only be available if the mobile or OEM company decides to bundle it comes some good news. Yup, the first beta of Opera Mini 5 is here, and for those who wonder... it's not just a J2ME port like before!

No, Opera Mini 5 Beta shines like polished Android for you. In fact you just might overcome much of the disappointment that you may not enjoy Opera Mobile any time soon. If a team within Opera Software can make dreams come true it surely is the innovative and hard working team behind Mini. After installing Opera Mini 5 Beta from the Android Market (it works on my HTC Hero, running Android 1.5) it looks gorgeous. Using red and black as the default color scheme it acts like any native Android application using full touch as well as the menu and back buttons.

So what kind of features can you expect? First of all Opera Turbo, which uses Opera's servers to compress web pages, is part of the package, increasing page loading performance while sending less data. Opera Link and Speed Dial are also familiar faces, where Link allows you to sync bookmarks (and more) and Speed Dial allows you to add several default pages on the new tab and home page. Page zooming works like a charm and uses the familiar double-tap to zoom into areas while you view the web site in an eagle-mode for overview. But there is much more, like find in page, tabbed browsing, landscape mode, a password manager.

In fact if you have an Android phone, you know, from HTC, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, LG, Samsung and all the others, just download it. You won't be disappointed. Isn't the Android world sweet, allowing Opera Software to offer even better alternatives of standard applications?

Almost just in time for the new web browser ballot screen in Windows 7, Opera Software released the final version of Opera 10.50, one of the most exciting releases in a while!

Although this is for the first time in years that Opera Software released their web browser for just one platform, as the Mac release is in beta, and the Linux version is still in pre-beta stage (available as snapshots). However sacrifices must be made sometimes in order to have miracles. And Opera 10.50 is a miracle. For the last couple of releases I've personally been a bit negative, but this one makes up for it, it truly does.

Carakan
At the heart of all the enthusiasm about this release is Carkan, the new JavaScript engine from the vikings. Simply put, when Presto came, it showed that they managed to create a completely fresh rendering engine within a short time frame, while Mozilla crawled along for years. And now, after all the fighting between Chrome, Safari and Firefox, there is now Opera 10.50 with Carakan that competes and even finishes off top dog Chrome's V8 in several benchmarks.

Private
Opera's browser was the frontrunner at introducing the well known "delete private data" functionality, but was left behind when Safari first introduced "private browsing", meaning it didn't store any private data once the functionality was activated. IE8, Chrome followed soon, while Firefox delayed the 3.5 release just for this. Opera was quite for a while, but now they've introduced it as it should, you can browse privately per tab or window, surpassing the competition in your ability to control it.

Engine talk
Of course Presto has been updated to support new standards (and upcoming standards). One of the most requested is support for CSS3 rounding of corners, which is now available in this release. But Presto is also assisted by Vega. Although previously it was thought to be hardware accelerated, Vega is currently running in software mode (don't worry hardware acceleration is still coming), and improves rendering of pages (and the UI) much better than before.

Platform integration
With Opera 10.50 you can see that they've worked on integrating with the platform it's running on. Most noticeable is the new Opera menu button in the top left corner that hosts all the standard menus. But also apparent is (when the personal bar is disabled) the new tab bar which shares space at the top of the browser, similar to Chrome (if it must be said). On Windows Vista and Windows 7 it looks even sexier with an all glass background, as many Firefox users want to have (emulated with add-ons). In a few words, Opera 10.50 looks better than IE, and is on par with Chrome.

Conclusion
Opera 10.50 is more than ever a big punch at the competition and shows that (with a 24 hour release candidate cycle) can produce a strong release when needed in a relative short time span. If you've used Opera before, or never, you should definitely try one of the fastest browsers out there.

Making it all the more confusing, the Windows version of Opera 10.50 has been updated to beta 2, while the first Mac beta is out as well. Linux users will have to wait a little bit longer though.

So we have to betas on our hands today, first there is the second beta for Windows which should show signs of maturity. Much of the focus went it to polishing the new skin (which looks nice on any Aero capable Windows), stability, memory and performance. You can read more about the individual changes on Opera Desktop Team's blog, found here.

The more interesting build is the one for Mac, as it contains new stuff compared to Opera 10.10. But before we start it should be noted that a PowerPC build is not available, but will be in the future. Ok, now that's out of the way (who has a PPC anyway?), the Mac version has gotten some love like the Windows version as well. The skin has been updated to contain a unified tool bar while using Cocao for everything you can touch and see. Other new features include support for Growl notifications and multi-touch gestures.

If you want to try something new, or see how well Opera adheres to the Mac standards of GUI-awesomeness, you can try the new beta, just as long as you buy Steve's iPad.

Opera Software has released the first beta of the already attention attracting Opera 10.50. Although currently only available for Windows, work on Linux and Mac builds continue as we speak.

The new Opera 10.50 release especially lured the press by showing great leaps in the JavaScript performance space. The new engine named Carakan is up to 8 times faster than the previous engine, bringing it to the same level as Chrome's V8 and Safari's Nitro engine. Other browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox are left behind, biting the dust (although IE9 will have some major improvements as well).

But Carakan isn't the first thing you meet. If Opera 10 was anything but a change in the UI department, this ten and a half surely is. Remember Windows Vista and Windows 7? Well, these two latest releases from Microsoft sported a new glass theme, called Aero, offering shadows, transparency and other effects. For the first time in a while Opera leaps beyond the competition, say with Chrome, to offer a truly native UI that fits your modern Windows' Aero. Aero Peek (Windows 7), Jump List (Windows 7), and a new menu bar under the red and white "O" button in the top left make it all look very sexy.

Opera always considered Widgets imported, and is pushing it to be as standard. While doing that they've also greatly improved its integration in Opera, by pushing it out of the browser. Opera Widgets now run in their own processes and can be started individually (after "installing" them from a web site). Say, if it's not your lucky day and the widget crashes, Opera, nor any other desktop widgets will feel the pain. Of course this also opens the opportunity to lift widgets to be richer applications than before.

Presto is known as one of the state of the art rendering engines found in web browsers today. Not only is it portable and fast, it's also loaded with standards support. In this release you'll find even more features from HTML 5 and CSS 3, such as video support and enhanced effects.

Another feature is the new Vega graphics library, bring fast and smooth rendering of both web sites as the entire browser responsiveness when switching tabs. Of course there is even more, such as a private browsing mode (finally!) per tab or window (even better than the rest!), modal dialogs per tab (thus not blocking the entire browser), and much much more.

Work continues on this release, especially on the other platforms (and their integration) as well as ironing out bugs. With Opera Software you're never sure, so in another beta we might even see more features. If you have Windows, go take a look at this big leap for the Opera web browser, while Linux and Mac users can always opt for the (more unstable) snapshot builds.

Following our story on the iPad, Opera Software issues a press release about a sneak peek of Opera Mini for iPhone. Those who're going to the 2010 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona will be able to preview it.

But wait, isn't there a problem, like a big problem. Huge even. Yup, the folks at Opera Software have not yet submitted it to Apple for approval. Without approval it will not be a part of the App Store available to iPhone, iPod touch and future iPad users. The current way of goings with approvals indicate that "confusing" products like Opera Mini, that use different rendering engines than WebKit, are not allowed. Opera Software hopes that Apple will approve it, on the grounds of freedom of choice.

Not much else is know about the iPhone release, but those going to the MWC will not be disappointed as there will also be previews of Opera Mobile 10 for Android OS (yay!), Symbian OS and Windows Mobile. Of course it's popular little brother, Opera Mini 5 will show its face, as the chosen champion for almost any J2ME powered phone.

Google may be the biggest competitor to Microsoft on a whole scale of non traditional ways, but one thing is definitely true, they are pushing new technologies where they can.

Where Apple dominated the new wave of touch-screen mobile devices, Android is opening up the market by exposing a similar OS albeit with multi-tasking and customization. In the same approach not pleased with the slow development of Firefox (hey where is that new update approach coming from Mozilla, and why?) they introduced a new way of browsing the web with the fastest JS performance and multi-processes.

Today is the day that they push technology in another way, though with a sharp edge to it. We already know that HTML 5 comes with the video-tag and that there have been arguments about whether support for the different encoders should be part of the specification. Currently encoders don't play a role, and Google opted for the most superior encoder out there, but with a cost.

H.264 is the new standard to be used for Google's latest HTML 5 experiment for YouTube, but the thing is only Chrome (Frame) and Safari support it. H.264 requires that you pay a certain sum, and although Mozilla must have the money (from the Google search deal), they do not support it, heck they only support the open-source OGG format.

Anyway, if you have Chrome (Frame) or Safari, you can now enjoy the HTML 5 video-tag without the need for Flash, and with perhaps better quality at the new YouTube page. You can opt-in here if you have a supported browser.

Opera Labs released a pre-alpha release of Opera 10.50, which has been in development for over 18 months. Sporting many changes, Opera Software released this build as a preview of things to come, thus it's not feature complete, nor stable.

For Linux users it may come as a disappointment that their platform will not receive a labs build at this time (surely it will come later), but those with Windows and Mac will be surprised by the goodies inside, specific for their platform.

Presto, Carakan and Vega
Long ago there was a story on this site on how Opera Software was able to rewrite their rendering engine in a matter of months, starting with only two developers. In comparison it took Mozilla many years and many people to come to something useful. Likewise Presto is still one of the cutting edge rendering engines out there that, like WebKit, allows itself to be ported to any platform, from desktop to mobile. So it's no surprise, and certainly hot news that Presto has been updated to 2.5 (Opera 10.10 comes with Presto 2.2) and includes a lot of much requested features (and standards support): CSS transformations, HTML5 local storage, and much more.

But that's not even the most exciting part. Carakan is here! Futhark has been the JavaScript engine for Opera for a long time, but it has been showing its age. Futhark was designed to be sparse on resources, while today we want maximum execution time. Following in the footsteps of Chrome's V8 and Safari's Nitro, Carakan is a JIT compiler based engine that shows 7x higher performance than Opera 10.10 on Windows with SunSpider. The folks at Opera Labs already note that on Mac this is less due to missing optimizations.

Vega, the new library used to render SVG and canvas elements has been extended to be the de-facto graphics rendering library. Although it is promised to use hardware rendering, the current implementation uses software rendering instead. But don't sweat, it will become hardware accelerated, but just not right now, as it's an early build. Peacekeeper, the benchmark from FutureMark shows even with software rendering an increase in performance of 3x.

Platform integration
Now that's a topic of lots of discussion and emotion. Opera has been slow in being platform integration, offering often a good looking cross-platform interface instead. But change is afoot. For Mac they've rewritten it entirely in Cacoa, which is the modern framework. This means nice flashy animations, unified toolbar, the end of the white resize thingy in the right bottom corner and native widgets everywhere. Oh, and the almost mandatory third party software support for notifications: Growl.

For Windows Vista and Windows 7 users the change may even be bigger. Aero support is here, meaning that the top of Opera is now all glassy transparent. The menu is also gone in favor of an application icon, much like Office, Paint and WordPad with the Ribbon interface. For Windows 7 users Aero Peek and Jump List support was added.

Privacy, pr0n
For a while now Opera was lacking behind on privacy, while being the first to offer the "Delete Private Data" option before the competition picked up. However with Safari and mostly by Chrome the option to go to private browsing mode on the fly (not storing anything, but not deleting either) became popular.

Opera Software has now followed the example and introduced private browsing per tab. Yes you read that last bit right, Opera offers private browsing per tab, and in fact more specifically per tab per window. You can seamlessly browse pr0n now while having other web sites open for stocks, weather, news etc.

Caution
As you can imagine this is an exciting release, though you might miss the Opera 10.20 features: stand-alone widgets. But there is some good and less good news. Opera 10.20 will not be continued, instead 10.50 will be favored (this is a good thing). Don't worry stand-alone widgets will return in Opera 10.50 in the course of its development.

I think Opera Software is right back on track in delivering what may be the most exciting browser release of 2010. Following their own ideals of providing an all-in-one package, rather than extensions like Chrome and Firefox, they may actually win new users by providing better privacy features, maximum performance, standards support and real platform integration.

Before downloading do note that this build is pre-alpha, it's really a preview of things to come and should not be used by normal end users. Well, with that out of the way, good luck, and don't forget to report your findings!

The Opera Core Concerns blog has been updated with a post about the upcoming support for native JSON. Now this may not be new as other browsers already support it, but the inclusion in Opera is.

The folks at Opera Software are working hard. On one hand they're working on the increasing popularity of web applications (Opera 10.20 with stand-alone widgets), while on the other hand working on speed (Opera 10.50 probably includes the new JavaScript engine called Carakan).

ECMAScript Edition 5 may not yet be a finished standard, but as a member Opera already is working on supporting it as much as possobile. JSON, which stands for JavaScript object notation (think XML notation but easier to parse), is being included in this new standard. By supporting it natively by the web browser (instead of parsing it through the JavaScript based parser itself), significant performance gains can be made. While no public build is available, the first number crunching results from Opera Software show that the performance is sometimes on top of everyone, and sometimes needs some little tweaking.

Nonetheless, the efforts are certainly welcome, and it's one of the larger collection of improvements that Opera Software has in store. It seems almost like they've awoken from their winter sleep too early ;)