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.