While the storm of downloaders is happening and the servers are being hammered it's time to expose this ugly secret: Opera 10 is out!

As announced the folks at Opera Software unleashed their latest major release in a while. Opera 10 sports a slew of improvements and is accompanied by new features as well.

Looks
Those who have not tried Opera 10 before will know they've upgrade right away as they are faced with a new skin. On Windows and Linux a new Opera Standard skin appears which offers more slick and modern look fitting in better. Mac users are welcomed with a hybrid Mac skin looking somewhat similar to the Opera Standard skin. The respective skins are meant to be default skins due to their neutral state and fit with any person. Regardless of that it just looks better than before.

Features
All the way from Opera Mini comes Opera Turbo to the desktop. This technology that uses server side rendering should improve performance on low bandwidth connections (eg. mobile or other non-broadband locations). Other new features include the thumbnail preview for tabs (just drag the tab bar itself down) as well as HTML composing for mail.

Improvements
Perhaps more interesting are the improvements that Opera Software made based on feedback and the competition. There is a real auto-update system this time that will notify you of new releases, download and install it, with just a few clicks. By request Speed Dial can now be customized with a background and pre-sets for the amount of Speed Dials you want. A Hunspell based in-line spell check now verifies you type correctly, and offers a GUI to download more dictionaries.

Lacking
However not all is well, several features are still lacking. While Firefox 3.5 supports ICC profile 2, and Safari 4 supports ICC profile 4, Opera 10 still lacks any color management. Also the famous private browsing made found in Chrome, Firefox 3.5, IE 8 and Safari is missing (there is of course still the option to delete private data). If you're looking for extensions (which is coming to Chrome in the near future) you will remain disappointed to find that Opera Software's stance on this has not changed. Opera 10 also does not use multi-processes like Chrome (or tab isolation like IE 8), while for instance Firefox is trying to catch up in this area. Carakan, the new JavaScript engine, is not in this release (nor has anyone seen it yet), so any (artificial) benchmark will indicate that Opera 10 lacks behind Nitro, V8 and TraceMonkey.

Conclusion
The new features are nice but won't compel users from other browsers to switch. Opera Software's renewed approach to work on polishing existing features is a warm welcome as Opera 10 still lacks a pack of improvements and features that the competition already has. If you are an Opera fan you can't go wrong. Opera 10 is not only faster, but adds new features while greatly improving the old ones. And most importantly Opera 10 feels rock solid, so far I've not made it crash yet!

Opera 10 is available from Opera Software's site for Windows, Linux and Mac and comes in 43 languages.